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Lollards in the high church of low cultureTue, 28 Jul 2015 18:17:39 +0000en-GBhourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=3.9.2You Think We Make Dreams In This Townhttp://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2015/07/you-think-we-make-dreams-in-this-town/
http://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2015/07/you-think-we-make-dreams-in-this-town/#commentsTue, 28 Jul 2015 18:04:00 +0000http://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=29113More comics reviews from goodreads.com

One of the nice things about the current rise of Image is the leeway it gives creators to do passion projects, in this case a pair of historical crime thrillers which stand or fall on how indulgently evocative they are of places long-established in other fictions. So The Fade Out is story set in the dream factory of 40s Hollywood, where fine movies are made by people of integrity who spend their time being nice to each other. ONLY JOKING! There’s a dead starlet pretty much on page one and after that it’s four issues of noir bingo, lovingly executed by the purring collaborative engine of Brubaker and Phillips.

I don’t really care about Hollywood, or noir. But these guys do. It’s obvious the word “comfort zone” is too small for where these creators are on The Fade Out: this is an all out luxury zone, with writer and artist pillowing down and indulging themselves in every possible trope. Drunks, skunks, reds both under and in the bed (maybe they’ll end up dead?) and plenty of real life stars to spot. It’s glossy, beautifully overripe even when it’s dark, a romp if you like. I’m not feeling it exactly, but I’m certainly enjoying it.

If I had to pick, though, I’d pick Satellite Sam. Fraction and Chaykin’s period piece of sex, suits and swearing at the birth of live TV has a strong middle act, with protagonist Michael White swapping one addiction for another as he starts to follow in his dead Dad’s footsteps. The ostensible mystery – Who Killed Satellite Sam? – becomes ever more of a MacGuffin in this volume, but it hardly matters: as with part one, you read for the texture more than the plot.

Where the second volume improves is serving up more interesting characters – while the main plot takes a leisurely route, there are revelations and developments for the supporting cast that make Satellite Sam a far stronger ensemble piece and make its 1950s seem vivid, even if each individual twist (a brutal wartime past; a black man forced to ‘pass’ as white in 50s TV) feels like it’s there to introduce commentary on the era as much as to deepen a character. But that’s period drama for you. A breezy conjuration of place and tone, with Chaykin enjoying himself drawing craggy men and fleshy women – though close consultation of the character guide is still recommended to make most sense of it. (3.5 stars / 4 stars)

Chris Dingess’ and Matthew Roberts’s American frontier history meets Cthulhoid horror comic continues to be one of Image’s more straightforwardly entertaining series. Beyond the high concept pitch this is a satisfying adventure comic, no less and not much more: much of this second volume is spent with the Lewis and Clark expedition’s crew trapped by a suitably squamous amphibian beast, which allows Dingess to develop and complicate his cast a little more, though makes for a less exciting few issues than the multiple horrors of volume one. A meeting with some locals at the end of the volume has as much plot development as the entire rest of the book, providing useful backstory and an indication of quite how out of their depth our protagonists are.

Something I particularly enjoy about Manifest Destiny is the sense of stretched resources, particularly of the human kind – even the vilest human being might at some point come in useful, so a lot of time is spent trying to rescue and repair men apparently lost to the monstrosities of the wilderness. It makes for a horror comic with a low body count but a strong sense of stakes, and Roberts’ enjoyably earthy, detailed art makes every scratch, gash, and pustule count. (3 stars)

A third stab at making the Secret Avengers title work for Marvel – this one a S.H.I.E.L.D. book in all but name, picking up some of the cast but none of the tone of Nick Spencer’s suspenseful run. Ales Kot’s approach has been compared to Hawkeye – it has Hawkeye in it, and he acts a bit like he does in the Matt Fraction book – but Secret Avengers reminds me of a whole stew of titles. Michael Walsh’s quirky, diagrammatic art is in line with Chip Zdarsky’s approach on Sex Criminals or Steve Lieber’s on Superior Foes Of Spider-Man, and Kot’s flip tone isn’t far off Superior Foes either. But there’s a commitment to stylish, near-future weirdness (a sentient bomb built by an art terrorist, to pick an idea that catches the tone nicely) that recalls Grant Morrison, or the grandfather of Marvel spy cool, Steranko.

That’s a strong list of notes to hit, and Kot is one of the more exciting and ambitious writers Marvel have found lately. Secret Avengers isn’t as good as his independent work, but it offers hip, smart, fairly sophisticated fun. It’s not quite cohering yet, though – some characters still feel like they’re in it by decree rather than need, the references can be a touch too on the nose, the situations hotter in concept than execution. But Kot writes a zippy Phil Coulson, Maria Hill, and Clint Barton and he’s the first writer to make the new Nick Fury seem like a good idea. In a character- and idea-driven book, that’s a fine strikerate. (3 stars)

The first time I read these stories – as individual issues, closer to when they came out – I adored the imagination and sensory impact of each comic but the story seemed looser. Not so, on re-reading: as a graphic novel the action in the first long story sets off the three shorter ones that follow it, and each one introduces crucial information for the series as a whole. Prophet’s reputation for trippiness sells it short – this is also well-planned science fiction in a complex and visceral universe.

That said, it is a gorgeous, sensual comic, one of Image’s very best – fluid lines, fleshy colours and widescreen, information-rich compositions working together as a far-future derangement. The minimal scripting is a joy, too – I feel like I’ve seen the impact of its terse potency across a lot of other comics, Image and otherwise. (Though perhaps the style begins earlier – but this was the first time I noticed it.) The action is portentious, but there is a lot of sly humour lurking in the details of panels – and, in the first story, in the reaction shots of beefcake protagonist John Prophet. Brandon Graham’s great skill – also seen in this year’s 8House:Arclight – is a kind of worldbuilding via alien ecology. Get the details of a food chain or system of exchange right and everything else falls bewitchingly into place. (5 stars)

This Cassandra beats her mythical namesake: people demonstrably listened to her, it’s just hard to remember what she sang. You’d have been forgiven for thinking the allocation of dance number ones at this point was working on something like a quota system: a slot needed to be filled, every twenty or so weeks, and some arcane quango had landed the job of deciding exactly which tracks would qualify. So “Dooms Night”, “Sandstorm”, “Kernkraft 400” all narrowly missed the top, and Rui Da Silva gets the nod. But really there’s no mystery as to how “Touch Me” got here – it was a clubland hit, and doomed attempts to clear a Spandau Ballet sample meant it had plenty of time to build demand such that 70,000-ish people nabbed it when it did finally get a wider release. The rest is simply luck, and a gap in the schedules.

“Touch Me” is a humdrum, overcast track, which threatens to build to something but then backs off into a noncommital house throb. Cassandra’s vocals are full-blooded but her melody is monotonous – her one-note drilling on “we can only understand what we are shown” is the weakest excuse for a hook we’ve met in a while. There’s more to like about Da Silva’s ominous backing, with the “Chant No.1” sample a ghost in the mix, though its presence wouldn’t suddenly have turned “Touch Me” into a classic. The video finds a crew of fetching urbanites crowding into a flat for a smeary, faintly druggy house party: just as this aspirational fun starts getting sexy, some sod heads up to the roof for a bit of fire poi. Appropriately disappointing for this false start of a record.

]]>http://freakytrigger.co.uk/popular/2015/07/rui-da-silva-ft-cassandra-touch-me/feed/27Popular ’00http://freakytrigger.co.uk/popular/2015/07/popular-00/
http://freakytrigger.co.uk/popular/2015/07/popular-00/#commentsSun, 26 Jul 2015 11:53:46 +0000http://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=29107Well, it took longer than I wanted, but we got there in the end: the 42 number ones of 2000, now reviewed and ready for your polling delectation. I give every number one a mark out of ten – here is where you can say what you’d have handed out. High scores this time from me included a 10 for Britney’s “Oops!” and 9s for Spiller and Black Coffee in a strong year. Which was also, by dint of the sheer number of hits, a weak year, with Mariah/Westlife and Five/Queen the double stinkers by my estimation. Over to you.
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Her career catalysed by her inclusion on “Stan”, Dido’s soft-spoken, ruminative pop became a familiar sound in early 00s Britain. On her second album, Life For Rent, she hit on a metaphor that cuts to the country’s quick, and obliquely hints why a stout claymation builder became the best-selling song of this over-stuffed year. “Life For Rent”, the song, takes the difference between renting and owning as its organising metaphor. “If my life is for rent,” Dido sings wistfully, “And I don’t learn to buy, I deserve nothing more than I get, cos nothing I have is truly mine”. Renting is provisionality, fear, the option of people who are just passing through, and whose opinion is too weak to count for much. Buying, on the other hand – now that’s commitment, maturity, the act of an adult.

More than an adult, a citizen. Bob the Builder was not the only such on TV. The screens of England in the 00s were full of property developers and home improvers, and they were us. Popular conservatism in the second half of the 20th century rested on the notion of the “property-owning democracy”, advanced by Anthony Eden and restated by Thatcher: the idea that private home ownership gave you a stake in the market economy. It was one of Thatcherism’s most seductive promises, and by the end of the century home-owners and their obsessions were a central part of British mass culture. But the emphasis had shifted – owning a house was no longer just a stake, it was a bet. One with generous odds and extravagant returns. If in 2000 Bob the Builder had built you a house in his home town of Bobsville – valued, naturally, at the UK average – then in seven years its value would have shot from £80,000 to £180,000. Stupefying inflation, and since real wages (or even fake ones) didn’t rise at remotely the same rate, it amounts to a one-off generational transfer of wealth to older homeowners that our economy and society is still reeling from. As the most popular Bob The Builder meme puts it, “Can We Fix It? No, It’s Fucked.”

Of course, Bob, like most 00s builders, didn’t do that much house-building. While his real-life counterparts busied themselves with conversions, regeneration projects, and the installation of square miles of decking, Bob’s jobs were cartoon economy staples – fixing a farmer’s fence so badgers couldn’t trample his crops, for instance. Bob is a benign figure, a mild-mannered, all-wise Dad to the eager, sometimes fractious machines in his charge. If he’s an avatar of Britain’s property mania, it’s no reflection on him as a character. But as I’ve argued elsewhere, kids’ culture is as sure a national barometer as you’ll find – it’s no accident that the hot new character find of 2000 is a builder.

The levels of his popularity seem startling now. Few current fandoms compare to Bobmania. Perhaps none do. This is the only million-seller of the year, the triumph of the new singles market that had pushed releases into supermarkets and Woolworths, where browsing parents would see them. And the single was just the tip of it. Bob toys sold out. Bob appearances sold out. Parents scrapped and four year olds trampled one another in stage invasions when Bob’s affable globular head wobbled into view. The cartoon became a kids’ TV classic, still in endless repeats (as well as new episodes) when I became a Dad myself. Neil Morrissey, playing Bob, became even richer.

Much of the enthusiasm was deserved. Bob The Builder is a well-crafted TV show with some excellent voice acting – especially from Rob Rackstraw, whose cackling, gulping Spud the Scarecrow is up with Zippy from Rainbow and Kenneth Williams’ Evil Edna as one of British childrens’ programming’s great comic voices. The machines are a colourful and entertaining cast, and well suited to the themes of friendship and effort each episode teases out. They are endlessly mechandisable, of course, but such is post-Teletubby reality, and Bob, unlike other cartoons, was restrained in the number of new characters it added to pump money out of the kids. Not everything is perfect: Wendy, Bob’s business partner, is hardly ever backed up by other good women characters, and rarely gets good stories of her own. For a flavour of Bob at his best, check out the 2003 Christmas special, A Christmas To Remember, where you’ll be treated not only to the standard Bobsville cast, but to an Elton John cameo, Chris Evans playing a rock star, and best of all, Noddy Holder guesting as the roadie, Banger.

The presence of rock stars (and Britpop boosters) hints at why “Can We Fix It?” exists and why it sounds like it does. Unlike the people at Ragdoll Productions, Neil Morrissey fancied himself a music fan, and felt a duty to make a song that might entertain adults as well as their kids. Or at least do their ears no great harm. “Can We Fix It?” is built around the cheery theme tune from the series, introducing the cast in a compact thirty seconds. To make it into a single, they toughen the music up, turning the song into a rudimentary kiddie-rock stomper. The entertaining video has Bob in a club, referencing blokey heroes of the British pop mainstream – Liam Gallagher is in there, who older kids might just about recognise, but also Madness, who they surely wouldn’t. The record keeps cartoon voices to a minimum – a missed opportunity if anything, as the show’s were good. It does its job with gusto and a knowledge of its own limitations. Neil Morrissey is no singer, and “Bob and the gang make a really good sound” is a statement of hope more than faith, but for kids, the record is chunky and satisfying with a call-and-response hook (“YES WE CAN!”) whose effectiveness has since been independently validated. Ten years on, I could play the video on an iphone to my children and they would chortle happily at the antics of Bob and the crew: an experience I’m quite happy to admit tilts my score a little higher.

It’s the sound of Britpop, long since moved out of Camden Town, settled down with a kid or two and considering a loft refurbishment once the shed’s been repaired. A happier ending than most of the ones we got in 1998, you might say. And it finishes off the year 2000, the decadent peak of Number One hitmaking, a year which switched between dazzling variety and baffling mediocrity week over week. Britain’s housing bubble is beginning its long rise; but its pop bubble is at maximum inflation. The foundations both were built on would have had Bob The Builder shaking his head and sucking air through his teeth.

]]>http://freakytrigger.co.uk/popular/2015/07/bob-the-builder-can-we-fix-it/feed/23Left Me Standing Like A Guilty Schoolboyhttp://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2015/07/left-me-standing-like-a-guilty-schoolboy/
http://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2015/07/left-me-standing-like-a-guilty-schoolboy/#commentsFri, 17 Jul 2015 08:57:59 +0000http://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=29091“It’s passionately interesting for me that the things that I learned in a small town, in very modest home, are just the things that I believe have won the Election.” – Margaret Thatcher, 4 May 1979

“The biggest horror is that the whole world’s becoming suburban. I find it very worrying.” – Norman Mansbridge

COVER

The last thing on anyone at IPC’s mind, when they launched a comic, is that somebody might actually want to keep the thing. Comics were born on the production line, and landfill was their grave, and in that brief span between their urge was not to survive but to reproduce, to impel the reader to buy next week’s issue. So in May 1979 the second issue of Jackpot – “IT’S A WINNER” invited mutilation at front and end. On the cover, a free SQUIRT RING to lure buyers in, mounted with sellotape, which still sticks to my Ebayed copy, covering a gash in the paper like a badly sutured wound. On the back, a coupon to fill in, cut out and hand solemnly over to the newsagent: “PLEASE RESERVE A COPY OF JACKPOT FOR ME EVERY WEEK”.

It’s a loyalty game. There are only so many kids who want to buy comics, and most of those already do. A new title offers a raft of new stories, which may or may not wear better than the ones in the comic you already buy, whose formulae have begun to thin and fray. But with a squirt ring, too – who wouldn’t risk ten pence? Then once you’re snagged, the magazine urges you to the newsagent for next week. You don’t want to miss out.

So it is that the first comic you see in Jackpot No.2 is a three panel, silent strip, admirably clear, instructing you on the use and delight of your squirt ring. Panel 1: a girl shows off her ring to a passing boy. Panel 2: the boy leans in close to admire this fine piece of jewellery. Panel 3: SPLOOSH! A deluge – in the poor sap’s face. HAW HAW!

Reality disappoints. The squirt ring is an ugly lump, it brings no boys to the yard, and the feeble spit of water its bulb holds wouldn’t trouble an ant. Like most cheap pranks, the squirt ring only works if all participants have silently agreed it will – an indulgent Dad, perhaps, leaning in to play the patsy.

This conspiratorial element, this lack of real surprise, is not unique to the squirt ring. To grow up in any culture is to become gradually aware of its web of social relationships, customs, and norms, and of your place in it. Only so much of this awareness can come from direct experience. The rest of the job is done by stories. Fairy tales, comics and cartoons – the first fictions you meet – carry in miniature an implicit social order, or, more rarely, a glimpse of alternatives. We romanticise comics for kids as an escape from reality – an opening of a door into wonder. But to do this they often play a double game, and reinforce reality at the same time. If you want to understand a society, look at its comics.

IPC/Fleetway, publishers in the 70s and 80s of Buster, Jackpot, Cor!, Whizzer And Chips, Knockout, Monster Fun, and dozens of other weekly comics, were not especially interested in alternative social orders. When such things disturbed them in real life – in the form of union action, for instance – the typical reaction was harsh. The existing social order, on the other hand, interested them a great deal. It was their bread and butter. The twenty or so strips making up a typical Fleetway title were social comedies for the under-10s, in which all the hierarchies and absurdities of society might be turned into a gag strip. The status quo might be mocked, but not seriously challenged. The jokes in these social comedy strips, like the squirt ring, work because everyone agrees that they will.

If the cover dates are right, Jackpot’s first issue came out on the day of the 1979 General Election – a genuine challenge to the status quo. I don’t remember the election. I do remember buying Jackpot. It became my comic – ten pence a week, every week, bought with especial loyalty because I’d been in it from the start.

A comic is a machine for understanding society. How does this one work?

RICHIE WRAGGS

The first strip is by Mike Lacey, son of another comics artist, Bill Lacey. British humour strips are identified by artist: scripts were provided by other, nameless freelancers, or often simply worked up in-house. In the case of a new comic with new stories, like Jackpot, the artists might have a hand in the look and feel of the strip – vital, since the plots are so rudimentary.

Most strips are one-pagers, turning on a simple premise. In this case, Richie Wraggs is a poor country bumpkin turned tramp, looking to make his fortune alongside his cat, Lucky. Each week he seems to have fallen on bad luck, but the situation reverses to produce a happy ending and – always temporary – riches.

This episode rests on a laboured pun about “crock” – the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow – and “crock” meaning worn out vintage car. This won’t be the last pun we see. You imagine scripters, close to deadlines or the end of their tethers, reaching grimly for a pun in lieu of a plot. That this is the best they can manage two episodes in doesn’t say much for Richie Wraggs’ potential.

Given an idiotic story to work on, Lacey has a decent go. The meandering plot at least means Richie Wraggs shows off many iconic subjects of British comic art. We see cats (a fleabag, naturally), heaps of sausage and mash (the national cartoon food), and accidents involving a pot of paint.

And, of course, yokels. Richie Wraggs talks in West Country shorthand, and is inevitably a dimwit – the rather faithless Lucky provides commentary on his foolishness. His benefactor, an old man in a large fur coat, is upper class and genial. As we’ll see, it’s rare for posh characters in Jackpot to be shown in a good light: presumably the law that country folk are fools is stronger than the law that the upper classes are venal graspers. There is no letters page in Jackpot: if anyone from Richie Wraggs’ part of the country read it, they had no outlet for complaint.

ANGEL’S PROPER CHARLIES

The second strip is by Trevor Metcalfe, an art school graduate who got into comics after his National Service. In title only, it’s a TV spoof – one of the genres British comics ran on. Angel, a young girl, has three boy admirers, her Charlies – each week she beguiles them into helping her with some mischief. This week she wants to get into the Circus without paying.

Jackpot might have been bought by any children, but it’s obviously pitched as a boys’ comic – the majority of protagonists are boys, their friends are generally boys, and so Angels Proper Charlies is unusual. Not just because its lead is a girl, but the central theme of the strip is boys making fools of themselves over a girl. Angel is imaginative and resourceful, but not entirely independent: her job is to manipulate boys with her beauty. With the rather icky job of signifying pre-teen irresistibility, Metcalfe wisely goes for big 70s hair and a big smile: sophistication, not sex. The main audience, I’d guess, was kids with older brothers and sisters, viewing their emergent passions with a pitiless and scornful eye. Still, the message – girls will try to make a chump of you – comes through miserably clear.

For the second strip in a row, the plot involves slipping through a board in a rickety fence.

FULL O’BEANS

The third strip is by Tom Paterson, hired by IPC straight after leaving school. Paterson’s art is immediately more enticing, wilder and more exaggerated, than anything in the comic so far. He’s a follower of Leo Baxendale, creator of the Bash Street Kids for IPC’s great Scottish rival DC Thomson, and probably the single major figure in British humour comics. And you can tell. The physicality, the love of action, and the occasional grotesquerie in Paterson’s style are straight from the Baxendale playbook.

Full O’Beans is a strongman story – a stock “kids with amazing powers” idea. In this case Freddie hulks out when he drains a can of cold beans from his special stash. The plot is beyond basic – a drawer in Fred’s Mum’s dresser is stuck, he uses bean power to open it, wrecks the dresser, then rebuilds it. The focus is all on ludicrous feats and uses of the super strength – like chopping a tree into planks.

Any fences? Yes. Fred and his Mum are poor – their room is damp and peeling – but they live in a detached house with a fenced garden. It will turn out that almost every room in every strip, from office to home to hovel – is drawn this way, full of mildew and old wallpaper. (See story #20, Laser Eraser, for an illustration). A few years before we’d moved house, from a bungalow to a three-bedroom suburban home. Exploring the new home is an early memory. The vacated rooms were as Jackpot describes.

MARATHON MUTT

The fourth strip is by an unknown artist – the only one which I couldn’t find even claimed credit for. Some strips in Jackpot are signed, some aren’t. There’s no consistency, and it’s not as if the big name illustrators get signatures. It’s a shame I can’t find details for Marathon Mutt, as it was a particular favourite.

Partly that was down to the unusual format. Marathon Mutt is a gag strip done as a continuing serial – the adventures of Henry Bono, an anthropomorphised greyhound, who competes in a marathon against other breeds of dogs. Each breed has a gimmick – a sausage dog rolls, a springer spaniel bounces, and so on. The inspiration is obviously Hanna-Barbera’s Wacky Races cartoon, a showcase for this mix of slapstick comedy and minor dramatic tension. Back then it was the tension I liked. Now I like the textures of the landscape, which create a rudimentary but welcome sense of place. But Marathon Mutt is out of step with the social comedy of the rest of the comic, even with the cliffhanger it’s a little gentler.

THE TEENY SWEENEY

The fifth strip is by Jack Oliver, one of the younger IPC artists at this stage and another obvious Baxendale disciple – wilder than Paterson, indeed. The story is a TV spoof, more direct this time – its leads are roughly meant to be child versions of Regan and Carter, the heroes of British cop show The Sweeney, which had just finished its TV run, full of hardcase action and car chases. For The Teeny Sweeney, this means an appearance for a staple of British comics, the cartie, a rickety, gravity-defying soapbox cart.

Broadly speaking, the imagined suburbia of Jackpot strips – fences and all – is recognisable from my childhood. The strips are not quite placeless – in this one, our heroes cart their way to a farm, which suggests a more rural backdrop – but generally you can map Jackpot’s landscape onto most towns outside the very inner city. The home-made contraptions of kids’ comics, though – the soapbox carts and catapults – were alien to me. I was too middle-class to have friends who built them? Certainly a possibility – but it also seems likely that in their heyday these gadgets had proved themselves too useful to cartoonists to ever be discarded, visual shorthands for all kinds of outdoor fun.

The gag in this strip involves overhearing a farmer talking about a “kid napping” – the writer usefully including a space, to drain as much humour as possible from the payoff (perhaps you too can guess). Maybe it’s the quality of the material that nudges Oliver into indulging one of British comics’ greatest traditions – filling panels with puns, sight gags, and extras: a disembodied hand marked “FARM HAND”, or the words “CARTING IS SUCH SWEET SORROW” on the side of the speeding soapbox.

JACK POTT

The sixth strip is by Joe McCaffrey, who learned to draw while at sea with the Merchant Navy. He was in the middle of a long IPC career, creating Jack Pott for an earlier Fleetway title, Cor!! This makes Jack Pott the only strip carried over from any previous comic – IPC in their 60s and 70s prime much preferred to commission new titles and fresh (or re-sprayed) ideas than run reprints.

Jack Pott is a good example of a theme strip. Jack is a kid who wins things. That’s pretty much all there is to it. He’s lucky, or skilful, or a good gambler, depending on the story. It’s not a promising set-up, and prone to disapproval, which is probably why the character had been rested for a few years and wasn’t given top billing despite the comic’s name.

McCaffrey does a fine job here, though. He’s not a chaotic cartoonist in the post-Baxendale mode, instead he cleaves to the jovial, unflashy, direct comic storytelling I think of as the IPC house style. So the strip doesn’t have a lot of visual fizz, but the storytelling is impeccably clear. This is the first story where you don’t need the captions – Jack’s friend challenges him to win a ring-the-bell game at a fairground (another stock setting), and by a bit of luck and slapstick, he does. Two panels have zero dialogue – a sign of trust in a pro, you’d think.
LITTLE ADAM AND EVA

The seventh strip is by Paul Ailey, an artist who mostly ghosted and filled in on other strips, but gets a signature here, on Jackpot’s most bizarre story. Adam and Eva are kids, in a garden, which possesses a tree of knowledge, and a serpent – Serpy! – who is trying to tempt them to eat its fruit, because one particular apple will “spell their downfall”. Luckily, the other apples don’t do this, they just give useful tidbits of info.
Theologically this is an interesting take. Though of course the garden isn’t named – that wouldn’t get past the IPC editors. It’s testament, if nothing else, to IPC’s unshakeable belief that there is no situation you can’t get a strip out of if you make the characters kids.

Serpy is one of the most obscure Satan figures in British comics, and one of the more entertaining, but even more so than Marathon Mutt, Little Adam And Eva is way out of step with the rest of the comic. (I remember rather liking it.) Ailey has an attractive style, light on detail with a nice strong line and bold shading. Unfortunately, the strip gets an extra colour – red – which only emphasises the fact we’re reading a story whose leads spend the entire time naked.

CLASS WARS

The eighth strip is by Vic Neill, who’d mostly worked for Beano and Dandy publishers DC Thomson. He’d modelled his style initially on Dudley Watkins – another great UK comics figure, creator of the Broons and Oor Wullie. Watkins’ art was rooted in strong storytelling, an unusual degree of detail and a great repertoire of comic faces. On Class Wars, Neill offers a more streamlined version with touches of Baxendale grotesque. It works well – the story’s two pages hardly need their dialogue.

The strip title is pun intended. This is the first story where Jackpot’s social comedy turns into conflict. it’s a school strip (every mag had at least one) with the tension coming from a mixed class of working-class scruffs and stuck-up posh kids, thrown together when a private school is forced to merge with a comprehensive. A burly teacher acts as referee. In this story, the scruffs are doing their best to pelt their posh classmates with mud.

The resolution here is wildly unfair – eventually the teacher, treated with contempt by the scruffs and obsequious but patronising regard by the posh kids, gets hit by mud himself and gives everyone a cross-country run as punishment. But the strip knows better than to go against the social coding of decades of kids’ comics: tearaways have more fun, snobs don’t, so the snobs have to get their come-uppance in the end.

Except Class Wars is a much more conservative story than it might look. The outcome may be unfair, but the codes of behaviour are absolutely clear. Working class kids in this story are lazy, thuggish, and hate learning. Their moneyed counterparts are prigs, but hard-working and resourceful. Within the standard knockabout of the class-tension storyline, resolved as usual when authority intervenes, lurk some very nasty stereotypes.
GREMLINS

The ninth strip is by Steve Bell, a former art teacher, briefly stopping over at IPC en route to spending 30+ years drawing the If… newspaper strip for the Guardian. Bell’s style is still in development but it’s recognisably him – the fleshy roundness of his characters with their bulging noses; the toothy black blots that are the titular Gremlins, agents of mischief and malfunction in an ordered world.

Bell, a young cartoonist, is firmly in with the post-Baxendale wing of Jackpot, and while he’s not as extreme as some he’s inherited Baxendale’s love of disorder. The Gremlins exist to make things go wrong, Bell exists to depict the consequences as entertainingly as possible. The strip builds toward a single large, chaotic panel as a gremlin-infected shopping trolley goes wild in a supermarket. Nothing is resolved – the human leads can only flee as the shopkeeper shouts “GRRRRRRR!!”. There’s a gleeful chaos here quite unlike anything we’ve so far seen – order is not restored, and the gremlins represent the unpredictable and unaccounted for in Jackpot’s comic suburbia.

THE INCREDIBLE SULK

The tenth strip is by Jim Petrie, a DC Thomson lifer, who drew 2000 episodes of Minnie The Minx. The Incredible Sulk was rare IPC work for him, and he’s obviously enjoying drawing in a rather looser style: the strip plays with panel borders as a component of the story, a common trick now but unusual in this era. As Sulk’s rage builds, the edges of panels distort and their composition gets stranger – at the height of his anger, Sulk is barely on-panel, racing out the back and the front of panels, so angry he wants to break out of the strip.

These elemental tantrums made Sulk one of the comic’s biggest hits – never mind the very repetitive nature of the strip, this is pure wish fulfilment, a kid not only losing his cool (as they all do) but getting utterly away with it. As in Gremlins, the strip cuts out with chaos firmly in the ascendant. But here it’s a more relatable human chaos. I don’t know if Petrie was doing the stories as well as the art – there’s definitely a sense he’s being given a much longer leash than most of the artists, and he’s using it to the fullest.

GOOD NEWS/BAD NEWS

The eleventh strip is by Nigel Edwards, more prolific in the 80s for IPC – this may be his first gig, in fact. He’s yet another in the looser, Baxendale mode – his hero is a cheerful grotesque, and the liberal use of sound effects (“PONG! REEK! WAFT! GASP!”) shows the desire to cram as much comic detail into the strip as possible. Edwards would become a major contributor to OINK!, the last doomed triumph of the Baxendale style, a scatological “Junior Viz” of the mid-80s which goaded the censorious elements in British society and quite swiftly fell to them.

Back in 1979, this is one of the more unusual Jackpot strips, a formalist conceit, with a twist in every panel. Good news and bad news alternate – each situation is either complicated or resolved one panel on. The result, inevitably, is a strip that’s much denser than the average, with no panels wasted. A perfect fit for Edwards’ style, and it was a favourite of mine at the time. But it’s also slightly exhausting, a rigid fever pitch of action, laying bare the principles of rapid comic development that every one-page humour strip is discreetly obeying anyway.

KID KING

The twelfth strip is by Reg Parlett, son of an illustrator and postcard artist, and an IPC stalwart – he’d been at the company since 1923 and had over a decade’s work still in him at this point. As the excellent site Toonhound points out, it’s astonishing nobody had come up with this strip’s concept before – the ultimate fulfilment of the “kids do grown-up jobs” genre, a British comic staple. What job is more important than a King?

Kid King is a fantasia of absolute childishness rubbing shoulders with the absolute pomp of adulthood. All through this episode, kids invited to play in Kid King’s palace constantly think the guards are going to kick them out (or mow them down!). In fact they’re handing out toffee apples and lollipops – a carnival inversion straight out of the hippie imagination. But Play Power, or any kind of power, isn’t on display here: the strip is never about mocking the monarchy or its trappings, just about how fun it might be to have them as your toybox.

Parlett’s bold, fluid line is a great fit for the story – he’s a master of body language, revelling in the contrast between the loose-limbed Kid King and his stiff-backed retinue. Body motion in a lot of Jackpot strips feels rather overdone – a lot of windmilling arms, leaping, kicking to swiftly diminishing effect. Parlett, wisely, keeps it simple.

IT’S A NICE LIFE

The thirteenth strip is also by Reg Parlett, and it’s Jackpot’s colour centrefold. Jackpot’s palette is basic but very lurid – ultra bold yellows, reds, and greens with little mixing. This isn’t the best fit for Parlett’s art. His style is smooth, leading the eye easily from panel to panel – the colouring slows it down, even wrecks some gags. A three panel sequence of Stanley Nice trying to yoke pigs to a plough loses all detail: just not enough contrast between pigs, mud, and Stan’s jumper.

It’s A Nice Life is the most clanking of all Jackpot’s TV spoofs. It’s a comic remake of massively successful BBC sitcom, The Good Life, with the main tweak being that both the eco-friendly “self-sufficient” Nice family and their stuck up neighbours have kids. Not the only tweak, though. The Good Life was a gentle satire on both suburban aspiration and alternative lifestyles, with both families roughly on the same rung of the social ladder.

It’s A Nice Life is less ambitious. Satire isn’t the aim – the set-up is just an excuse for more on that favourite IPC theme, the class struggle. Stanley Nice and his family live in a caravan. Next door is a large private home with not just a car in the drive but a private motorboat. Whatever the origins of this pair’s rivalry, by its second episode the irresistible rhythms of the IPC class conflict strip have asserted themselves.

The stereotypes are more one-sided than Class Wars. Stan himself is just a twinkle-eyed cheeky chap. His rich neighbours – like the earlier strip’s posh kids – have a love of consumption and a horror of dirt. Naturally the strip ends with them ploughing their neighbour’s muddy fields with their precious new bicycles. (“HOW DEGRADING!”) Below the gag is a very 20th century bourgeois nightmare – to be stripped of your assets and put to work farming: a suburban Cultural Revolution, played for laughs.

Not that Mao was on the minds of the IPC scriptwriters – though with the pressure to crank out pages to fill a half dozen titles, you took your ideas as they came. But it’s emblematic of social relations as they play out across Jackpot’s strips. The world of Jackpot accepts that class struggle is axiomatic. But it also accepts that this is eternal – its class war is also a cold war, resetting, week upon week, to comic stalemate. No outcome to the class struggle is ever in prospect. The toffs would always despise the toughs, and vice versa – such were the facts of life. In which case best to have fun with them. This, if anywhere, is where the comic reflects the consensus politics of mid-century Britain, which ended the week Jackpot began.

LITTLE AND LARGE LENNY

The fourteenth strip is by Norman Mansbridge, a former political cartoonist, of no strong party opinion, who had turned to kids’ strips in his retirement. His speciality as illustrator and comic artist was suburbia, and he spoke of his growing realisation that the orderly jollity of suburban existence often masked cramped, neurotic lives. His great contribution to British humour comics was Whizzer & Chips’ Fuss Pot, one inspiration for The Incredible Sulk: a girl whose unstoppable tantrums drove her respectable suburban parents to despair. The repression and selfishness of suburban life made manifest.

Since almost all of Jackpot’s strips are set in an undefined semi-suburbia of fences, busy streets and neat lawns, Mansbridge is an obvious fit. Unfortunately, he’s saddled with an uninspired kids-with-powers strip. Lenny can grow big and small, and uses the power to discomfit a grouchy suburban hoarder of lost footballs – yet another stock strip character and crime. Size-changing is one of the great gifts to comic illustrators, a ready-made excuse to have fun with perspective, which Mansbridge does. But I’m not surprised this is one of the Jackpot strips I didn’t remember.

CRY BABY

The fifteenth strip is the second by Mike Lacey, artist on Richie Wraggs. In rare interviews with IPC script veterans, former writers explained the firm’s methods. Artists would stick with a strip for a long time, while the uncredited writers would often be rotated to keep them fresh. Run out of ideas for Jack Pott? Have a go on Kid King! Inspiration proved easier with some strips than others. Writers particularly cursed “Sid’s ****ing Snake”, a flagship Whizzer & Chips strip about a boy and a giant serpent. Notoriously stony ground for ideas, let alone laughs, yet too popular with the readers to ever ditch.

Cry Baby does not strike me as a strip with legs. It’s a cross between the Incredible Sulk subgenre of tantrum wish fulfilment and the amazing powers strip. Tina has the mutant power of producing literal floods of tears. In this strip her nervous suburban parents put her into a wetsuit and bathtub before obtaining – how? – a sea rescue raft, which she fills with tears and uses as a swimming pool. It’s a strange story. You can imagine kids fantasising about getting their own way, but incessant crying? Part of the point, though, is the pantomime of parental anxiety: “OH NO! YOU’LL SOAK OUR NEW CARPET!” And there’s something primal and powerful about how terrified the parents are of their daughter’s emotion and its potential to wreck their home and possessions.

This feels like a good place to point out that everyone credited or claimed as working on Jackpot is a man.

THE TERROR TOYS

The sixteenth strip is the first whose scripter we can identify. It’s Tom Tully, an old school IPC action writer who did a lot of sports story work. By 1979 Tully’s long career was winding down, but The Terror Toys is a re-edit of a 1960s strip, The Toys Of Doom. At four pages long it’s double the length of anything else in the comic, and is also dead serious – a sudden insertion of action into the humour format, varying the tone. It worked on me: I was hooked by the story of tiny, deadly toy soldiers and murderous bears – one scene, where a child was attacked by toy battleships in his bath, gave me nightmares.

If Tully’s identifiable, the artist is trickier. The drawing is pitched older than the other strips – more realism, more shadow, more detail in the background, and less of the kind of art an older, sillier me would learn to disdain as “cartoonish”. It’s a solid, old-fashioned action comic: two kids stumble upon the plans of a grotesque toymaker, but neither adults nor their peers will believe them. (Their tactics involve smashing up kids’ brand new toys, not a great dialogue starter.)

The internet suggests either Argentine great Solano Lopez – best known, at least by Google, for his porno comic Young Witches – or an artist from his studio. To complicate matters bits of the strip have been redrawn as well as edited. Still, the thick, Raggedy Ann style hair on the kids reminds me of the cheap, stylish South American artists IPC habitually used on their older boys’ comics, even if it looks nothing like Lopez.

The Terror Toys has little to do with the rest of Jackpot: even though I loved it, it was a few years before I read adventure stories for preference. I’m a little sad to learn it was a reprint – its thrills age six felt purely mine – but not surprised. Whoever drew it, their reference might have been stills from any 30s or 40s British film, even one set fifty years before that. This is an incursion from a foggier, creepier old England than the merry suburbs of Jackpot standard.
TERRY AND GAVIN’S FUNTASTIC JOURNEY

The seventeenth strip is by Ian Knox, who’d trained as an architect, but at this point was doubling a job drawing kids’ comics with a role as “Blotski”, the political cartoonist for Red Weekly and Socialist Challenge. Perhaps fearing his revolutionary potential, IPC have given him the comics’ least earthbound strip, a surrealist fantasy in which a pair of children and a crazy professor take to the skies in a “Welly-copter” and visit one absurdist land a week.

Of all the Jackpot strips, this feels one of the most old-fashioned – maybe it’s the Welly-copter itself, as the comic potential of the welly boot was an article of misplaced faith when I was small. Or maybe I’ve just never clicked with this brand of zany fantasy, whose unlikely events seem arbitrary in the way the handy life rafts and passing vintage cars of other strips never quite do. It doesn’t help that the kids rely on their adult friend to get things done – mostly because it turns the second half of the strip into exposition, but also because Knox can’t seem to nail perspective and get the height ratio of kids and grown-ups consistent. (In fairness, he’s dealing with a magic land where everything floats, which is a bugger to establish distance and direction in).
There’s an irony, too, that of all the strips to suffer from Jackpot’s elephant-gun approach to colouring, it’s Blotski’s that arrives absolutely doused in red.

MILLY O’NAIRE AND PENNY LESS

The eighteenth strip is by Sid Burgon, a former mechanic whose co-workers encouraged him into a career drawing. He drew for some of 70s IPC’s most popular strips – like Ivor Lott And Tony Broke in Buster, of which this is a sister strip. If it wasn’t obvious from the title, this is, yet again, a class conflict story. Unlike in It’s A Nice Life, there’s no TV spoof to provide a pretext. The set-up is very simple, though. Milly O’Naire – who lives in Moneybags Mansion – is rich but vain and mean. Penny Less is poor but ingenious. Penny wants something from Milly, and each week works out a way to get it.

This is a strip you could imagine Blotski getting his teeth into. It opens with Penny Less and her family, reduced to eating stale bread. She goes to Milly’s mansion only to find her serving banquets to her pet ostriches, who peck Penny off the grounds. There’s no camaraderie here, and none of the hidden stereotypes of Class Wars: Milly is nakedly hostile to her poor counterpart, and is unequivocally the villain. And the resolution finds workers occupying Milly O Naire’s grounds until she pays them to go away.

This is the most accomplished and satisfying of Jackpot’s class struggle strips, and Burgon is one of the definitive IPC house style artists, with his chunky backgrounds, fluid line and rock-solid storytelling. When I think of reading IPC titles as a kid, it’s Burgon’s art I see. But Milly O’Naire And Penny Less is thoroughly of its time. It gives zero ground in assuming the rich are venal and callous, and the poor are quick-witted and deserve a slice of the wealth. To use a modern term, the strip “punches up”, however cheerily. And even though it’s a kind of pantomime punch-up, one centuries old, with no suggestion that the social positions it depicts could ever change, it’s impossible to imagine a humour strip like this getting made now, partly because the country sneers at families living on stale bread, who are nobody’s heroines. Meanwhile a rich girl feeding cake to her pet ostriches might land a reality show or a record deal.

But this was one of Jackpot’s most popular stories, just like Ivor Lott And Tony Broke (identical save gender) was in Buster. The kids culture of the IPC comics rippled with social and class anxiety, and readers loved it.

SCOOPER

The nineteenth strip is our second by Tom Paterson, seen already on Full O’Beans. This is a much richer, more lovingly presented piece by him, crammed with details and full of a joyous grubbiness. Everything is dusty, run-down, grotty, but gloriously material. Paterson’s focus here is on expressive characters, particularly Scooper’s jowly, well-intentioned but incompetent Dad, whose nervous eagerness never lets up.

Scooper is a kids-doing-adult-jobs strip on journalistic lines, with Scooper the son of a local paper reporter. He goes out with his Dad to take pictures – which end up turning out to be of Dad screwing up. It’s a strong, flexible premise that means a huge range of things for Paterson to draw (this week it’s dogs). Notwithstanding a slightly flat script, Scooper is excellent.

And there’s something pleasing about one of the best stories in the comic being so low-concept: built on faith that a local paper beat is a place where funny things might happen. The one-line biographies of artists I’ve been giving suggest the range of backgrounds Jackpot drew its creative staff from – but one thing most of them, and surely their writers, shared was some immersion in journalism. Perhaps that accounts for the extra care Scooper seems to enjoy.

LASER ERASER

The twentieth strip is by Robert Nixon, an art school associate of Mike Lacey and similar in his clean and simple style – certainly on the ‘IPC house’ side of things. The strip knows the virtue of getting off to a brisk start: “EEK! HELP! ESCAPED GORILLA!” are the first words you see. “COR!” says our hero Ernie, and in panel two he’s zapped it into nothingness with the strip’s eponymous device.

The Laser Eraser can make things vanish from one place and return in another (the gorilla reappears and squashes a couple of crooks who steal the gadget). Nixon is a compact storyteller with a particularly good line in facial expressions, which works with the breakneck plot to make Laser Eraser feel a dense, good-value strip. The Eraser itself is a scripter’s gift – as long as you can think of a reason to have anything you like appear, you can use the Eraser to drop it into any other scene, creating the surreal combinations IPC strips thrive on with no plot strain.

ROBOT SMITH

The twenty-first and final strip is by Ken Reid, one of the great names of British comics, who created Roger The Dodger and died at his board still drawing an episode of signature strip Faceache. Reid’s faces made his reputation – clean-lined, detailed, but always entertainingly contorted – and his strip has a different feel from anything else in the comic. More old-fashioned, somehow – for all the 70s realism of the PE teacher’s trackie and combover.

Part of that old-school feel comes from the storytelling. Reid was famous enough to write his own strips, and Robot Smith is the work of a man steeped in their form and formulae. A situation is established in the first panel, resolved in the last, and in between is a series of simple sight gags. This episode – Robot tries out for the football team – could have been a Ken Reid strip from any time since the 40s. Even the premise – a robot goes to school – is like something out of a Charles Hamilton school story, and Robot Smith’s rivet-studded jumper and spring-driven legs are just as archaic. Next to the wild, Baxendale-style strips which represent the young generation of Jackpot, Reid uses startling amounts of white space, and lays out his panels with geometric fussiness. Robot Smith sticks out, but it’s a living reminder of the traditions the rest of Jackpot has built on.

TO THE NEWSAGENT

That’s the end of the stories. The inside back cover has the coupon for the newsagent (with a Marathon Mutt illustration) and the Jackpot Top 20 League Ladder, which you can fill in to create a top of the Jackpot pops.

Which means it’s time to think about what isn’t in Jackpot. Two things stick out as absent.

The first is pop culture references, scrupulously avoided by the IPC writers, in this mag at least. All through these write-ups I’ve commented on the texture of the strips – how familiar some of it feels, how distant in other ways. Jackpot is pitched at ‘everyone’, and as is often the way, everyone turns out to mean an imaginary middle: middle-class, suburban, aware of the poor and the rich and the rural, but at a distance, as exotic and comical elements. You can recognise 1979 in the comics, but only those broad outlines. With the large but specific exceptions of the TV spoof strips, the pop cultural texture of the time is missing: no punks, wookies, time lords, footie fans, disco dancers. A section of life, kept at arms’ length.

The second absence is more glaring now. Every face – every excited schoolboy, enraged official, idiot posho, hapless parent, everyone – is white. This was what parts of Britain looked like in 1979, of course. But only parts. Britain had welcomed – a mixed welcome, often – thirty years of Commonwealth immigrants; two hundred years of Empire before that had left the country more diverse than its xenophobes would have you think. My home was in a leafy, middle-class suburb, not too far off It’s A Nice Life territory, and I was at school with kids from families from India, Pakistan, Uganda, Ethiopia. The Britain that Jackpot presented was a plain lie. In May 1979 parts of the world it drew, and drew laughter from, were ending. But in important ways they had never really been.

BACK COVER

“Published every Thursday by I.P.C. Magazines Limited, King’s Reach Tower, Stamford Street, London SE1 9LS”. This was the start of a long, one-way association between my pocket money and Kings’ Reach Tower. First Jackpot, then Buster, then Eagle, then 2000AD, and finally the NME. IPC had me from cradle to rave. I can appreciate now what I didn’t then – that it was a somewhat sclerotic operation, prone to censorious fits, conservative in subtle ways despite all the outward fizz of its magazines. But their editors had a good nose for talent, however poorly they treated it.

It seems clear, looking back at this comic, that the IPC kids’ line was firmly artist-driven, and that the company was happy to pull in freelancers of any age and a range of styles. That’s the most admirable thing about Jackpot – the sense of a pack of different artists, of no one dominant style. The gonzo fleshiness of Steve Bell and Nigel Edwards; the loose line and tight storytelling of Reg Parlett or Robert Nixon; the grimy detail of Tom Paterson; the open spaces and weird faces of Ken Reid. It wasn’t something I noticed at the time – aged six, you bought for characters, not for art – but unconsciously maybe it filtered through, gave me a feel for variety. The flipside is that the scripts were often pitiful, insultingly lazy, a half-baked pun often built out into a whole page. The better artists kicked against that, by quality of storytelling or just a riot of detail. The others just drew it, and no doubt hoped for something better next week.

Next week, though! “DOUBLE TREAT”, the back cover says. A “magic numbers” card game and the covers of a cut out partwork – “WHY BE BORED?”. The last of the free gift cycle Fleetway would permit a new launch. Three weeks in and it would have to walk by itself. It did, until 1982 at least. Then the cull came.

IPC’s policy with its comics was notorious: hatch, match, dispatch. Launch a new title, if it failed, find an existing one to pair it with, and put the weaker to death. The readers would be given a weeks’ warning – “Great news for our readers inside!”. In Jackpot’s case, the host – and the eventual last survivor of the IPC line – was Buster, which inherited a range of strips.

Laser Eraser, the most leggy of the gimmick strips, made it over. So did Jackpot’s first black lead, when he eventually arrived: he was called Sporty, and was “good at sport”. A score-draw for progress. Terror Toys got yet another reprint. And all three of the class conflict strips – Class Wars; Milly O’Naire And Penny Less; and It’s A Nice Life – survived. Nice Life could pivot easily from a strip about hippies to a strip about yuppies. Ingenious Penny Less got a scholarship to a private school in 1986 – Milly O’Naire’s Dad went broke paying the fees. As for Class Wars, it hung on until May 1987, from Thatcher’s first election win to her last. But by then things had changed. The strip left Jackpot behind it with a more 80s title: “Top Of The Class”.

All illustrations copyright IPC Publications

NEXT: Under the shadow of the slipper – a closer look at DC Thomson and the Beano.

“Stan” is a murder ballad. A song – not the first or last such Eminem recorded – about killing a woman. If this seems a strange way to look at it, it’s because the record takes pains to make its murder incidental. Its victim is nameless. We know Stan’s name. We know his brother, Matthew’s. We know Slim, the persona Stan is writing to, and we know Marshall Mathers, the man who replies. We even know a possible name for the child the murdered woman is carrying. We do not know her name. That isn’t where we’re supposed to be looking. The spotlight in the song is on the relationship between two men, star and fan. It’s how Stan would have wanted it.

Still, the murder is not incidental: it’s the climax of the record. All through the song, beautifully layered under the vocals, are background noises. They accompany Eminem’s conversational, half-spoken rapping and the unassuming, mid-tempo beat: literal scribbles in the margin of the track, encroaching thunder and rain. In the third verse, the rain is broken up by the wet swoosh of a car windscreen wiper, and, on cue, a woman screaming. Her death, and Stan’s, are what this track has been leading up to.

The presence of a dead woman in the song makes matters more dramatic, certainly. In some eyes, it might even ennoble proceedings. In a somewhat notorious – and slightly tongue-in-cheek – piece for the Guardian, critic Giles Foden poured praise on Eminem as a poet, specifically making a comparison to the “dark” and “ironic” poetry of Robert Browning. I remember studying Robert Browning in school – a teacher was big on the same poem Foden compares “Stan” to, “My Last Duchess”. It’s dark and ironic because, you see, we gradually realise the narrator killed his last duchess. Eminem and Browning, linked across time by brilliance, irony, bodies.

The screams, when they cut into the soundfield of verse three, are visceral, some of the most unpleasant sounds to appear on any number one. Yet at the same time they’re corny, a bit of gruesome theatre to appease any Slim Shady acolytes who’ve been getting wriggly wondering where the funny stuff is. They’re visceral, I thought at first, because they’re corny – ultimately decorative in just this way. A shot of casual sadism, a dollop of murder to make a psychological study just that bit more hardcore. (Or, with a nod to Foden, more prestigious).

But I realised the murder does more than that. Stan’s nameless girlfriend is a sacrifice the story makes. For what? To prevent “Stan” being a particular kind of tragedy. Imagine the song without the murder: it’s a tale of how art can fill empty lives but can’t always save them, tracking Stan through fandom and obsession and finally self-destruction. But, for all his obvious delusion, you’d never have to stop feeling sorry for the guy, whose sympathy Eminem is skilful enough to make sure you lose only gradually in any case. Without the murder, the centres of the song shift. One of them is the moment where Eminem speeds up Stan’s cadences when he describes cutting himself, the urgency and vividness of Stan’s letter spiking up towards a burst of stresses (”it’s like adRENalin the PAIN is such a SUDden RUSH to ME”). Another is the slurred rambling of Stan relating a half-recalled bullshit urban myth about Phil Collins as he drives himself to his death, the mis-remembered song title the most perfect and somehow heartbreaking touch in a song full of astonishing choices.

I have to think about the song that is, not the one that isn’t, and the central narrative choice – the woman’s murder. It stops Stan being a tragic figure; turns him contemptible, an everyday monster. Why is it so important he becomes that? Partly it’s because the collapse in our sympathy for Stan means we might not lose too much sympathy for Marshall Mathers, the reasonable, reply-writing narrator of the fourth verse. Here’s where there’s some real old school irony, if you want it – Eminem’s carefully manicured, offhand, self-portrait as a busy but generous star, befuddled by but polite and helpful to his obsessive fans.

If listeners sympathised with Stan, Eminem’s dismissal of his self-harm – “I say that shit just clowning dog, how fucked up is you?” – would stand revealed as callous. But because we know Stan really is fucked-up, fucked-up enough to kill someone, Eminem has a shot at seeming wise. The same goes throughout his response. We know Stan is a monster, and because of that the song can treat his obsession as monstrous – most famously, the “we should be together, too” kiss-off line of the second verse, which, because the guy turns out to be a psycho, gives “Stan” a gay-panic overtone Eminem got called out on.

Often in stories, writers use a woman’s casual death as a spur to build the hero’s character. Here, it’s a device that makes clear who the hero isn’t, absolves Eminem by revealing Stan as just another murderous guy. Absolves him of what, though?

To answer that we have to remember how chippy and defensive “The Real Slim Shady” was behind its bonhomie, how keen Eminem was to promote himself as both a scourge of pop culture and a man besieged, with everyone from “feminist women” to Christina Aguilera trash-talking him, trying to pull him down. At the centre of the criticism was his misogyny and homophobia, the impact on his young fans of songs like the venomous “Kim” or “Bonnie & Clyde 97”, where the trunk murder motif first showed up. “Stan” is born from those traits too. But it’s also just as much a creature of its battling context as “Real Slim Shady” was. A key line – hidden in mid-rant, slurred mockingly by the drunk, desperate Stan – is “see Slim, I ain’t like you”. It’s more heavy irony – Stan has finally become exactly like Slim. But it’s only Slim he’s like – who never could have replied, because he’s not real. If “The Real Slim Shady” was Eminem trolling his critics, “Stan” comes on as him taking them in absolute earnest. He imagines their worst nightmare, the fan so deranged he actually does imitate Slim Shady. He plays the scenario out to its inevitable, horrible end, and then turns to camera and says, look, if anyone did this, it’s because they’re a psycho.

That’s Eminem’s point, one you might recognise from the weary defenses popular culture has to mount, time and again, against its censors. No, Grand Theft Auto doesn’t cause violence. No, heavy metal doesn’t cause suicide. No, Slim Shady isn’t an accessory to murder – Eminem getting his arguments in here before the media can find a real-life case to pin on him. It’s a familiar defense because it’s right. But long before “Stan” was released, a more nuanced criticism grew up alongside these simple-minded parades of direct cause and direct effect. Cultural influence isn’t the thunder and lightning, its the rain, falling steadily, eroding and altering things so gradually. “Stan” is a narrative, made up of authorial choices: one of those choices is to kill a woman to make a point about the men in its story. And as women were pointing out long before “Stan”, the rain of female bodies in so many stories, treated so incidentally, makes normal an idea that they are props, adjuncts to the story of a man. Just as his girlfriend is to Stan, whose motive may be unlikely, but whose crime is all too familiar.

“Stan” ends on a pratfall – Eminem’s “it was – damn!” which tilts the whole track into being a dark shaggy dog story or cautionary tale, if that’s how you want to take it. While he might have been surprised how the song took off, it’s obviously no throwaway. He takes immense care over the performance and its bravura execution. It’s undeniably a hip-hop track, and the hip-hop community picked up on it, taking “stan” into the language as a dismissive marker for fans committed beyond reason. But it also doesn’t sound very much like hip-hop. The tether of Eminem’s flow to the beat is gossamer; he’s using his skills as a rapper but never so you notice he’s rapping. The ancestry of “Stan” includes much rap storytelling but also older country and pop spoken novelties – cornball yarns like Red Sovine’s “Teddy Bear”, and the death stories so popular in the 70s. Eminem’s skill lets him be far subtler, of course. The epistolary mode – first time at number one since 1966! – means we don’t need a unifying narrator to dilute the psychodrama, and his mastery of internal rhymes lets Eminem keep control of the rhythm while hardly ever drawing attention to it. I don’t particularly enjoy listening to “Stan” – the final verses are a little too cynical and voyeuristic for me. But every time I do play it I hear something else in Eminem’s performance. In execution, it’s peerless: no other record does what this does.

That performance – and the novelty – quickly made “Stan” Eminem’s most famous track. But it goes deeper, too. The relationship between star and fan has been the centre of pop for decades. It’s the dream of becoming someone else, and maybe becoming yourself through that. An inherently chancy process. Still, anyone from Bowie to Madonna, from Presley to Gary Barlow, might have told the story of their number one fan, and with dozens of different outcomes, most less cruel than “Stan”. Eminem’s fortune is to find that story at the start of a time when the barriers between everyone are thinning – where almost anyone might have an uncomfortable fan, an obsessive enemy, an awkward request or confession landing in their laps at any time. No wonder a song which explores, verse by verse, how much identificaton is too much can still sound uncomfortable.

We are all sometimes Marshall Mathers now? Maybe, but we are just as likely to be Stan, not the murderous Stan but the Stan who has a shitty day and drifts away and puts songs on. Marshall was that guy too, which is why those verses sound human, not just ominous – why “Stan”, like the best ballads, is a song you can hear and hope maybe this time it’ll turn out better. It’s important to Eminem that he dash our sympathies for Stan, but it’s important that not all the song’s tenderness be wrecked alongside them. Which is where the second woman in “Stan” comes in.

Dido’s refrain, threaded through the song like a flyleaf between each chapter, was the first most listeners – to Eminem or anyone – heard of her. It’s sweetly sung, but with a slight reserve, a disengagement from the cold-tea despond of life she’s describing. Her detachment is designed to resolve, in the chorus of “Thank You”, into gratitude: a stock songwriting contrast, not too far in tone from All Saints’ “Black Coffee”. In “Stan”, of course, that chance of resolution is cut off. The only source of release is the picture on the wall, and the cycle begins again. Even though Dido’s voice is a lull and her interludes narcotic, her “not so bad” is the portion given to hope in this bleakest of great hit records. It’s not much. The endless drizzle, the numbed delicacy, and that glimpse of imaginary empathy – these are what precede, and survive, Stan and his girlfriend’s catastrophe. The same anomie, and the same rain, introduce Marshall’s reply as introduced Stan’s first letter. What was accomplished? Nothing.

“Never Had A Dream Come True” is enjoyably drippy, but does nothing to shake my sense that S Club 7 are the blandest proposition of this pop era. Like their other early records, it’s aimed at kids, and it feels aimed at kids: a Fisher-Price heartbreak set, a ballad which is as much a teaching aid for what ballads are like as a track in its own right. It doesn’t do its job at all badly, though. It fills the mulled December ballad gap the Spice Girls left behind, and the decision to drop the band element and give the whole track to Jo O’Meara works, gives the heartache a consistency and intensity the song probably wasn’t strong enough to sustain with a group vocal. There’s an air of innocent sincerity to this despite its functional TV show origins, one that lets it get away with its purely textbook sentiment. It’s an ordinary song done as well as it could have been.

Its lack of features makes “Never Had” a good moment to talk about its plush sponsor, Pudsey Bear, and the BBC’s annual Children In Need telethon. Like the BBC that runs it, Children in Need is an umbrella organisation, essentially redistributive, where eye-catching children’s causes that could probably manage without its support are used to raise skiploads of money; money that can also be funneled to smaller, less photogenic, just as worthy projects. Also like the BBC, Children in Need is respected in its profession and more generally loved by the public. It’s been running since 1980, bear mascot and all, a fixed point in the Autumn schedules. Of course, it didn’t take long to dabble in charity singles.

But unlike Comic Relief, which has scored a bullseye – sometimes two – nearly every year it’s run since 1995, Children In Need’s hitmaking record has a fascinating trace of BBC inefficiency. The year Comic Relief was starting its run, with 1995’s “Love Can Build A Bridge”, Children In Need put forward the number sixty smash “You Better Believe It (Children In Need)” by Patsy Palmer and Sid Owen. It’s not flopped quite as poorly since, though it has a potent record of picking artists just past their peak, backing unloved reunions (”Headlines (Friendship Never Ends)” bore its brand), and few charity records are as dumbfounding as Gary Barlow teaming up with a pop-grime package tour line-up for a version of Massive Attack’s “Teardrop”. Only the BBC – and Children In Need – would greenlight that. It struggled to #24.

The nature of Popular is that we’ll meet the times Children In Need get it right, which are mostly less interesting. “Never Had A Dream Come True” is probably the best of them, glutinous in spots – that bloody stardust effect again – but reputable, easy to imagine kids buying and liking in its own right. Hard to object to. Except that, inevitably in a market defined by a tight turnover of release dates – this kind of TV tie-in pop could gradually begin to eat up the chart calendar. First Comic Relief, then Children In Need – why not other charitable moments? And if a charity TV show can get a hit more or less to order, why couldn’t a commercial one? The reality TV era – which would eventually give O’Meara enough rope to end her dreams for good – was well underway by now onscreen, and looms ahead of us on Popular. It would part viewers from money in ways that made telethons seem herbivorous, and the charts would be fully implicated.

]]>http://freakytrigger.co.uk/popular/2015/07/s-club-7-never-had-a-dream-come-true/feed/27Popular Crystal Ball: 2015 – What Are You Waiting For?http://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2015/07/popular-crystal-ball-2015-what-are-you-waiting-for/
http://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2015/07/popular-crystal-ball-2015-what-are-you-waiting-for/#commentsSun, 05 Jul 2015 15:24:31 +0000http://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=29044I’ll let you set the paaaace…. what? Only eight new number ones? Well, we’re not trying that again.

In order, best to worst. The usual caveats apply: don’t expect this to be much of a prediction of final verdicts when I eventually write about them! And obviously it’s a much shorter list than the last two – since the first two months, pretty much, were gobbled up by “Uptown Funk”. The number one position finally starting to match the sclerotic progress of the charts as a whole, then.

What did we get?

1. YEARS & YEARS – “King”: I feel hustled into this one a bit – BBC Sound Of Winner, Popjustice endorsements – especially as I can’t quite work out why I like it so much. Is it the rare hint of something unhealthy, unwholesome, mildly consumptive in the singing that’s getting my Morrissey glands twitching? Or is it just the way the hook threatens to break into “Tarzan Boy”? The stats don’t lie – this is certainly my most played of the year’s hits. Anybody’s guess how it’ll sound later.

2. JASON DERULO – “Want To Want Me”: Perennial will-this-do merchant comes good with a jump into electropop. Aims for Prince, ends up at Minor Royal, but if you set yourself high standards you might end up somewhere catchy. A future “oh it’s THIS one” floorfiller.

3. ELLIE GOULDING – “Love Me Like You Do”: An unpromising premise to say the least, but the best bit of the 50 Shades franchise is the one with no writer credit for EL James. The singer/producer combination is exactly right for this to work as softcore high-gloss escapism, a bonkbuster take on the “Show Me Heaven”/”Take My Breath Away” soundtrack smash.

4. OMI – “Cheerleader (Felix Jaehn Remix)”: This is the first reggae number one since… how long? Man! In the grand tradition of reggae number ones, remixed to fuck to make it sound less weird. Luckily, they haven’t totally succeeded. Potentially very annoying, but there’s enough going on and the ingredients are strong enough to make this potent in small exposures.

5. JESS GLYNNE – “Hold My Hand”: After the knock-down, drag-out, deep house death arena that was 2014′s number one line-up, a victory lap is only deserved. Huge, strutting, one eye on the sports montages. Not sure why I don’t like it more – a bit bludgeoning, perhaps?

7. WIZ KHALIFA ft CHARLIE PUTH – “See You Again”: The most indelible hook Puth is ever going to write – one of those that sounds like it’s always existed waiting for some chancer to grab it. Far weaker hooks get made to stand on their own, so I dunno why this one gets smushed into exhausting stadium rap. When I first heard this I thought it would be number one forever, but we seem more restrained now. A good thing. It’s still not going away any time soon.

8. SAM SMITH ft JOHN LEGEND – “Lay Me Down”: The first half of this is aggressively, suffocatingly worthy. The second half at least offers spectacle – a great half-British abase-off, Smith and Legend using melisma to tunnel under each other in their pleas for what sounds like ultimately quite awkward spooning. And there, with the future of British pop, the balance of payments’ darling, we shall leave it.

It’s hard not to let what Beyoncé Knowles was become swamped by what she is. A veteran, an icon, a woman enjoying a remarkable critical peak, an earner, second only to headphone mogul Dr Dre on current musical money lists – Beyoncé, as she is happy to tell us, works astonishingly hard, but one of the things she works at is controlling her narrative, shaping her career so that each step seems higher than the last, and her success appears pre-ordained. It was there in the name of her own group. “Child of destiny… independent me…”. But that’s only a story. Nothing is really inevitable, and Beyoncé enters Popular running, working, managing her options, using her group’s remarkable success as a springboard, while trying to win a PR battle over the palace coup that finished a multi-platinum line-up and cut a quartet to a reshuffled trio.

The stakes were very high. The Writings On The Wall sold millions and helped reinvent its genre. In sound and attitude, the singles from it were astonishing, particularly “Bills Bills Bills” and “Say My Name”, which would glide, jab, purr, stutter, break down into precise micro-maps of beatwork and then be reconstituted in time for their earworm choruses. The group themselves were a match for their production, just as happy to change modes mid-song. Or even mid chorus – take the way “Bills Bills Bills” jumps from the sweeping repetition of “bills….bills…bills…” to the sudden, sprightly kiss-off of “I don’t think you do / So you and me are through”. On “Say My Name” the angry stacatto of the verses, and their rushes of paranoid realisation, complement the keening, screw-turning chorus: it’s a masterpiece of suspicion and wrath, playing off the great history of those emotions in soul music while sounding like nothing before.

But the group who made those songs was gone. LaTavia Roberson and LaToya Luckett complained about the management and found themselves discarded mid-video. By “Independent Women”, one of their replacements had already quit. Destiny’s Child was now a trio. That would be its final and platonic form, its megastar incarnation, one that still reforms now and then. Luckett and Roberson became the Sutcliffe and Best of the group, banished from Destiny’s Child before things really got big – or so the new story framed it, and never mind that no subsequent album actually sold as much as The Writings On The Wall:

Big was certainly the plan. Survivor - the album – is a soggy thing in parts, but it announced itself with unparalleled clarity and determination: three singles, three manifestos. “Independent Women, Part 1” was the first, with the most to prove. Right away, it’s clear something has changed. The switches and feints of “Bills Bills Bills” or “Say My Name” are replaced by a far more direct approach, a straight-to-the-point funk loop that bumps away all through the song, a framework to showcase its three singers. The aftershock of the new lingers – this record may streamline and back off from earlier advances, but it still sounds thrilling and self-possessed, confidently honing its approach while everyone else catches up. But there’s no question anymore of the production becoming the star. Whether or not ‘futurism’ was ever the point of Destiny’s Child, it isn’t here.

The group’s lyrical approach has also hardened. The 1998-9 singles were vignettes: little bullet-time panoramas circling a particular interpersonal crisis just at the moment of collapse. “Independent Women” throws out that approach and again prefers something that pulls your focus onto the singer: a song built around a rhetorical device, the snapped “Question” at the start of every line. It’s remorselessly direct: economic and sexual independence were always in the music, the subtext of “Bills Bills Bills” or “Jumpin’ Jumpin’”, but there’s zero room for subtext here. The new Destinys’ Child is ruthlessly on the nose.

So whether we want to be anachronistic or not, there’s no escaping it: everything’s pointing in the same directon. The music toned down, more a framework for its singers. The lyrics turned into a rhetorical barrage, keeping the focus squarely on who’s delivering them, not their situation. And the basic mathematics of the new group. There’s no centre to four (or at most – this was Roberson and Luckett’s complaint – a double centre), but three resolves into a natural shape on stage and on film, a V formation. Just ask Mary Wilson and Flo Ballard. While the spotlight in Destinys Child sometimes rotates – and Kelly Rowland’s glorious, camera-pleasing repertoire of smirks, side-eyes and reaction shots is the group’s secret video weapon – this incarnation of the band is a machine built to make a singer famous.

Before it can do that, there was a film to promote. “Independent Women” tackles its job as a soundtrack single for Charlie’s Angels as directly as it tackles everything else. Beyoncé isn’t just sharing the spotlight with her co-Childs, but with three other women – Lucy Liu, Drew Barrymore, Cameron Diaz – who get individual shout-outs alongside constant lyrical nods to the film. This is a hostage to fortune, you might think – Charlie’s Angels was a sharp, fun movie, one I remember with only fondness, but “Independent Women Part 1” is a landmark record by one of the major 00s pop groups. There’s certainly a risk the constant product placement might diminish it now.

I think it dodges that risk. Partly it’s that within the economic game the record uses to define independence, showing off your soundtrack deal is plainly a legit move. Partly it’s the thematic tie – Charlie’s Angels is a vision (or fantasy) of a Hollywood where women get to front action films, and the line between the record made to promote the movie and the record Destiny’s Child would be making anyway is almost invisible. (”Synergy”, as the memos no doubt put it.) Mostly it’s just that the record is so forceful a celebration that it brushes caveats aside.

Because while it’s easy to see Destiny’s Child’s new directness in terms of what’s been lost, this is pop, and there’s an advantage to making the obvious unavoidable, going all-out for the anthemic. The context the group operated in wasn’t just their earlier singles, it was a trend within R&B of probing power-games and inequalities in relationships: TLC’s flaying of impecunious suitors on “No Scrubs” just the most prominent example. By September 2000, when “Independent Women” came out, Billboard could refer offhanded to “a wave of male-bashing sweeping R&B”. If they didn’t have the no-nonsense stringency of Destiny’s Child’s ‘98-’99 singles in mind, others were happy to lump the group in. The concern was overstated: rock and pop songs had been about women, money and sex since forever. The only twist was now the women had – on record, at least – control of the money and the sex. But the trend was real enough. “Independent Women, Part 1” doubled down on it by presenting the underlying theme as starkly as possible.

That meant cash: if you’re going to do a song about independence, you aim for what keeps people dependent. “Independent Women, Part 1” is as clear sighted about the transactional side of relationships as any Gang Of Four song – the difference being that the critique is pragmatic not systemic. The solution to inequality is to earn enough to afford what you want yourself. Here’s where the song’s focus, its musical and lyrical bluntness, pays off – the successive “I bought it… I bought it… I bought it…” is a stirring application of force. And then the record plays its best trick, taking the latent churchiness within the preaching, rhetorical style and unleashing it for the chorus, turning individual autonomy into a communal celebration – “throw your hands up at me!”. It’s not solidarity, exactly – no room for those who can’t or won’t earn. But in that moment, “Independent Women, Part 1” – the anthem, the film promo, the comeback, the crest of a trend, the next step in a business plan – lives the dream of the virtuous market, where all interests perfectly align.

]]>http://freakytrigger.co.uk/popular/2015/07/destinys-child-independent-women-part-1/feed/71New Popular Entries: Where And When?http://freakytrigger.co.uk/popular/2015/06/new-popular-entries-where-and-when/
http://freakytrigger.co.uk/popular/2015/06/new-popular-entries-where-and-when/#commentsSun, 28 Jun 2015 21:35:48 +0000http://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=29038Hello – just a quick note to reassure people that we haven’t gone back to the bad old days of no updates. My situation is as follows – I’ve been on a long, complicated work project which finishes tomorrow. Then on Tuesday I’m going into hospital to have my gall bladder taken out – if all goes well I’ll be out on Tuesday night and will be recuperating for a week or two. At some point during that I’ll start updating Popular regularly again!

(The next entry is actually half written – if I manage to finish it I’ll put that up, as it offers a bit more discursive meat than poor LeAnn.)

Meanwhile, this is an excellent opportunity to go check out the masses of new recent posts on Marcello and Lena’s Then Play Long blog, which has surged back into activity with some superb writing on the LPs of 1989.

“Same Old Brand New You” showed that the Max Martin style could be achieved on the cheap – but what happened if you went in the other direction? Plasticky British pop wasn’t the only strain under pressure from the Swedes – America’s pop establishment, typified by ballad queen Diane Warren, also needed to react. “Can’t Fight The Moonlight”, co-written by Warren, is one attempt. It’s an expansive meeting of styles – a sweeping film soundtrack number, produced with thumping, Martin-esque drama. Just in case that wasn’t big enough, the producer is Trevor Horn, obviously no stranger to maximalist visions for pop. Somewhere in this colossal landscape is LeAnn Rimes, a young country-to-pop crossover act who seemed more comfortable at the faith and flag end of her original genre.

Can it possibly hang together? Can Warren’s, Horn’s, Rimes’ and (in spirit) Martin’s contributions align? From its first chord – distorted, almost grungy, but enormous – “Can’t Fight The Moonlight” sounds overstuffed, like “Oops…I Did It Again” on growth hormones. Martin’s songwriting trick at this point – simple, but immensely successful – was to introduce ideas and bring them gradually together, so that his hits come in with relative understatement and go out with a mighty collision of overlapping hooks. “Can’t Fight The Moonlight” starts big and finds itself with nowhere much larger to go, reliant on ever more pop-eyed yawling from LeAnn Rimes. Luckily the song, especially that confident chorus, is strong enough to just about carry this weight.

But the production doesn’t really work for it. “Can’t Fight The Moonlight” is, in its bones, Tin Pan Alley songwriting, a romantic metaphor with a lyric hung around it. It’s flirtatious, a world and a tradition away from the feverish interiority of Britney’s hits, say. And the metaphor is one of fate – events are beyond the control of Rimes’ intended; it’s the bewitching power of the moonlight – of traditional romance – that’s making the running. But the staging of the song as a display of overwhelming strength is giving the moonlight one hell of a push. Horn’s thunderous production, and Rimes’ hulked-out twang, suggest not so much drawing down the moon as threatening to physically smash it into the Earth. The Martin style runs into its limits. It can excite, but it can also exhaust.

]]>http://freakytrigger.co.uk/popular/2015/06/leann-rimes-cant-fight-the-moonlight/feed/32It’s A Metamorphosishttp://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2015/06/its-a-metamorphosis/
http://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2015/06/its-a-metamorphosis/#commentsWed, 10 Jun 2015 15:19:35 +0000http://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=29019This is a reprint from my Tumblr, from a meme where people asked for album reviews. This was for Very, by the Pet Shop Boys (and Bilingual too, as it turns out).

I got an anon asking about Bilingual too, so I’m going to consider them together as the NEIL TENNANT TURNS 40 diptych of albums. There may be an element of projection in this, dear reader. Tennant of course coined the phrase “imperial phase” to describe the moment when you’re pop’s darling, and it ends at – no coincidence this – roughly the point at which house music takes over from the post-disco/hi-NRG dance music the PSBs made as the default sound of clubland. So all their run of albums post Introspective to about Nightlife (maybe that and Release too) are him (and Lowe, who knows!) coming to terms with this.

The first move is easy – prove your songwriting chops and show you’re a serious guy with Behaviour, but Very is the interesting one. The Behaviour singles did OK, but the tide is going out on them, the music has changed under them and Tennant’s in his late 30s – they know they basically have one more shot at making a great pop album which forces its way into the public consciousness, which gets and earns coverage in Smash Hits as well as respectful write-ups in the broadsheets. And Very is their attempt at that album, the last event Pet Shop Boys record.

On one level it’s a really fucking ponderous record! Almost all the songs feel like big statements, it’s ultra-maximal in its sound, even the joke track (”Yesterday When I Was Mad”) feels like ten different productions layered on each other. The first single nicks a title from Trollope (!) and is an ultra-dense psychodrama of denial and self-realisation; the second single is a Village People cover restaged as a high-camp, high-stakes concept single about AIDS and the end of the Soviet Union… they are really not dicking about here. It’s a record that is resolutely focused on being a great album, to the point where you can hear the strain on some of the side 2 tracks – “The Theatre” and “To Speak Is A Sin” are given a really weighty treatment that I’m not sure helps them as songs. But it comes so close to being a triumph, and the ambition of it is glorious and “Go West” and Chris’ little coda song is the best end-of-career mic-drop since, I don’t know, Abbey Road?

Except, of course, their career didn’t end, and life doesn’t end at 40, and on Bilingual Neil Tennant, age 42, can be goofy and corny and liberated and embarrassing again, and just as importantly try new things. I was so disappointed in Bilingual when it came out, so much that I don’t think I’ve heard it since 1996. And it’s an absolute revelation. After the thunder of Very they sound really at ease with themselves. “Before” could sidle up next to George Michael’s “Fastlove” in a grown-up disco. He’s happy to rap terribly on “Metamorphosis”, which is both about and an unashamed enactment of a mid-life crisis. I LOVE him in corny globetrotter mode on “Se A Vida E”, dispensing, you know, actual wisdom! “A Red Letter Day” is a remix away from being one of the great Pet Shop Boys singles. He is comfortable singing in public, “Such a cold winter / It feels as slow as Pinter”. This is someone who does not give very much of a fuck, I think. There are crap tracks – “Saturday Night Forever” is a weak closer, the one which is just him mumbling about Disco Tex and the Sex-O-Lettes is funny if you’re in the right mood, but you very well might not be.

But they’re also pushing forward – the sudden interest in using different rhythms is a way out of a potential creative impasse which works more often than not, and – very alert to potential criticism, as ever – “Discoteca”/”Single” makes itself about tourism and cultural exchange: that dyad is the high point of the album. “Discoteca” is the guilty twilight side of “Single”s brash (and convincing) inhabitation of a global businessman, and having it come first works beautifully, lets the two songs complicate each other. It sounds as if they’re writing with the stage in mind, too – “The Survivors” is a Very throwback but has a theatrical quality that would ripen on Nightlife and after. When I was 23 I heard this record as haunted and tentative. Now I’m 42 myself I hear joy in it, and its inconsistency feels like the inevitable outcome of curiosity.

A1’s “Take On Me” was a needless re-spray of the prior generation’s classic pop. Now their magpie tendency turns to their own times. After Billie’s “Day And Night”, this is the year’s second I-can’t-believe-it’s-not-Cheiron number one, a studied and whole-hearted application of the uptempo Swedish style to an English boyband. “Same Old Brand New You” makes no secret of the moves it’s learned from its sources, and adds only the lightest of new twists in the form of a body-rockin’ electro breakdown.

It ought to be as cheap and dismissable as “Stomp”. But somehow it’s not – “Same Old Brand New You” is a minor gem, a song that never fails to sweep me up with it, and the best boyband track since Five’s “Keep On Movin’” at least. It’s not an especially complex song – it has no hidden twists or musical surprises. It does have a big, satisfying faux-Max chorus that it builds itself around very effectively – everything in the track teasing and cranking up towards the dramatic “gone, gone, gone” refrain that ignites the chorus hook. And it’s a boyband performance that makes excellent use of its modest resources. The autocue vocal readings that spoiled “Take On Me” are replaced with a song that splits and rejoins its four slightly wheedling voices with real panache: the nervy defiance of the “same old line / one more time” sections, for instance.

That doesn’t fully explain why this works, though. Compare America’s boybands, and their real-Max uses of the bombastic, percussive-chord style: “Larger Than Life”, “Everybody (Backstreet’s Back)”, “It’s Gonna Be Me”. They’re all about self-assertion, the Cheiron style as a young man’s confident swagger. Those boys do get vulnerable, of course, but they do it ballad style. A1’s song is different. The boys are on the losing side in this relationship, confused and left reeling by a woman’s caprices. “If you don’t wanna find me gone, gone, gone, gone, gone!” they sing, but the way their voices corkscrew around the word, spiralling down into the chorus, you know there’s no hope of them making good on that threat, of escaping the torment.

A1 succeed, in other words, not because they’re trying to be Swedish, but because they’re trying to be Britney – the abject, melodramatic Britney of “You Drive Me (Crazy)”. It’s a good look for them. An idea presents itself: British boybands often spark most to life when they have to act like losers – when their borrowed moves and practiced lines won’t be enough, and desperation pokes its way through. Westlife – who never expose themselves like this, even when their songs offer a chance of it – often remind me of the 1950s and 1960s in the worst way. But there’s something about “Same Old” that recalls Joe Meek and the wounded urgency of his productions for the Honeycombs and John Leyton. For all its counterfeit modern finery, “Same Old Brand New You” lives by the same thing groups like A1 have lived or died by since the sixties at least: the unselfish conviction they can bring to their lies, pleas and promises when cornered.

“My Love” is Westlife in their pomp – a seventh straight number one, leaving records trailing. They were as popular as they’d ever been, which is to say, not as popular as you might think: a steady fanbase of a hundred thousand or so first week fans, but nothing in the way of crossover. Still, they sounded monolithic enough. “My Love” starts intriguingly hesitant, as if it wants to be their “Knowing Me Knowing You” – “I’m all alone, the rooms are getting smaller” (Imagine Westlife, trapped in a malfunctioning TARDIS.) Of course, that doesn’t last, and the windswept chorus of “My Love” – a de facto title track for their second album, Coast To Coast – is them at their most banner-waving. It’s confident and assured, big-chested – they know what they’re about by now, these boys. Cheiron – the jobbing end of Cheiron – are back too. A memo is sent out to stakeholders: the Westlife enterprise has considered the possibility of changing its business model for the second record, and politely rejected the proposal.

Still, change has a way of creeping up on you. The next Westlife single is the first I don’t have to write about – no, I haven’t checked what I’m missing – and so “My Love” is the first possible ending for their Imperial Phase. It almost sounds like hubris, even, though ultimately Westlife are too pleasant a thing for that. We’re halfway through. Their first seven number ones spanned eighteen months; their next seven take seventy-two. It’s a long, slow road down. And if you were to leave one Westlife single to future generations, a monument to their stolid, turn-waiting dominance, it might as well be “My Love”. The song has their strengths – they knew how to build a basic, sturdy emotional arc across a track, and how to layer on those thick-set harmonies in support of it. And in its weakness for a smarmy resolution, and its unwillingness to push its opening feelings, it has their failure to build on even that mild potential.

The original concept for the third Spice Girls album – according to Stannard and Rowe, the writers and producers the group jilted for Forever – was that it would concern the girls becoming women, the group maturing along with their audience. Even ignoring the fact that these “girls” were already the five most successful women in British music and sticking purely to the branding, It wasn’t the most promising of ideas. Sure, a lot of the charm and quality of Spice was how unapologetic it was in drawing inspiration from teen magazine problem pages – balancing friends and boys; safe sex; being nice to your Mum. It might have aimed itself squarely at a particular market, but it didn’t talk down to them – and in not doing so, it won a far huger audience. But Spiceworld had already moved away from that, and besides, there were plenty of grown-up alternatives out there. The Spice Girls never making anything like “Black Coffee” was no shame: forcing themselves to try might have been.

In the event, Geri went, and the sessions were scrapped – she was the group’s most enthusiastic conceptualist anyway. The corny idea – and faint desperation – of the girls-become-women notion does underline, though, what a difficult position the rest of the group were in. They were still a success – their 1998 World Tour had been a sell-out – but the pop transformation they’d helped set in motion was moving with startling speed. When Spiceworld was released, the wave of Spice successors was only beginning to break: “Spice Up Your Life!” predated B*Witched, Billie, and All Saints’ number ones. In the three year gap between it and “Holler”, those bands had not only flourished, but largely vanished. British pop was a boys’ game again, and in America, the girls were the solo ex-Disney stars, with their rather un-Spicely angst. Or they were R&B groups – more futuristic and more polished than the Spicers’ brash cheek had ever allowed for. The Spice model of the group – a cartoon gang of pals, with one broad personality trait apiece – had been holed by Geri’s departure: now it was sinking.

Ultimately, it would have taken an astonishing tactician and brilliant songs to have led the Spice Girls through the changed pop landscape and have them emerge anywhere near its top. The group had neither. They had four tired women whose minds were half on their solo careers, and they had Darkchild, aka Rodney Jerkins, aka the producer of “Say My Name”, aka the first male vocalist on a Spice Girls track. Saying his name, as it happened, and the group’s name, and the track’s – and date-stamping it for good measure. Like “Holler” needed to sound any more 2000.

By now we knew a bit about the Girls’ individual tastes and instincts. Emma and Victoria had made dance music – rather more startling than “Holler”, in the latter case. Mel B had made plenty of R&B attempts. Mel C had at least dabbled in it, but she’d dabbled in everything, and her voice sounds most subdued and least at ease on this single. Still, a move into modernist R&B shouldn’t have come as a shock, or felt like a disappointment. And Jerkins as a producer had more than enough pedigree for the job – as well as the swiss-watch engineering of “Say My Name”, he’d helmed Brandy and Monica’s delightfully dramatic “The Boy Is Mine” and Whitney Houston’s icy comeback, “It’s Not Right But It’s OK”. He had a flair for songs, and vocals, built around emotional pressure, and strong women holding up under it. There should have been room for a great collaboration.

But Jerkins is also an inconsistent producer – scan his list of hits and there’s a fair bit of drizzle among the flashes of lighting. “Holler” shifts and shuffles in a competent, modish way but he’s not trying to change any games. Nor, to be fair, are the singers. The first question for any Spice Girl co-writer or producer should be how you accomodate four (or five) very different voices, and give the sense that this is a group, not just women passing a mic around. The early singles managed it impeccably – even “Spice Up Your Life!” brazened it through. On, “Holler”, a few background coos aside, there’s none of that feeling. “Holler” is no disaster, it’s just an okay R&B single with sub-par vocalists. The track bumps politely to its end: there’s the feeling of a duty having been done, but no remaining chemistry or spark.

The audible “will this do?” of “Holler” at least gets the answer “yeah”, which is more than I could say for “Let Love Lead The Way”, the group’s return to the soft psychological slowie mode of “Mama” or “Goodbye”. It’s feeble – there was a grain of the specific in “Viva Forever”, “2 Become 1” or any of the earlier Spice ballads that gave the songs life. “Let Love” is pillowy and puffed-up, the group – their vocal weakness as obvious as it’s ever been – dealing with big, airy questions in winsome fashion: “Why is there joy? Why is there pain? Why is there sunshine and the rain?”. You can safely bet that whatever the answers to these profound questions, they won’t be found on the forgotten half of a footnote hit by a knackered band that sounds like it can’t even work out why it exists. The song offers its own, depressing response: “No matter what, we must go on.” The Spice Girls made two fine number ones that could have ended their era. Here, finally, it’s ended for them.

A visit to budget supermarket Aldi is a pop semiotician’s delight. The shelves are lined with Aldi’s own versions of name brands, all designed to trick – or reassure – the mind that what you’re buying is almost the authentic one, or at least so close in look as to be close in quality. The game is always to create packs that feel as near to the model brand as possible without actually drawing down any lawyerly wrath.

At Asda, for instance – where name brands sit alongside the store ones – the own-label version of Coco Pops is called Choco Snaps and features a bemused bear, not a cheeky monkey, and a large black banner with the supermarket logo. Aldi has no such modesty: its Choco Rice comes in the bright yellow livery of Kelloggs’ and has a monkey of its own. Working as Aldi’s designers must be an entertaining job, with a measure of critical analysis required to negotiate the gap between the identifiable parts of a brand and the legally defensible ones.

And here we are at Steps’ “Stomp”, a song whose guts and foundation is Chic’s “Everybody Dance”, whose chorus is about everybody dancing, whose CD single – according to Discogs – carries the note “A Tribute To Nile Rodgers And Bernard Edwards”… and yet it isn’t “Everybody Dance”. And the “tribute” is of the kind that doesn’t involve writing credits. “Stomp” is the Aldi Choco Rice of pop, a song that is trying as hard as possible to be another song while making certain it doesn’t get there. “Would my honourable friend please acknowledge that clapping is a movement of the hands, whereas to stomp is a motion of the feet? The songs are clearly quite different.”

If you sit down to a bowl of Choco Rice, you’re still going to get a faceful of sugary cereal with doubtful nutritional value. And “Stomp”, while it’s playing, carries off its Chic impression with good-natured gusto. Steps were often cheap and often cheerful, and if those weren’t their very best qualities it’s fair enough that they landed the group at Number One twice. Even so “Stomp” is a strange record, very easy to ignore, its careful tinkering with a familiar classic somehow ending up as even more unnecessary than one of the era’s rash of cover versions. Other hits of 2000 explored disco as a space for drama and possibility: “Stomp” is closer to the majority experience of disco as it likely was – colourful, happy, tacky and forgettable.

A theological detour. The rise of New Atheism – Dawkins et al. – seems to have made it somewhat infra dig for lifelong unbelievers like me to admit there are things we respect and admire about religions and the religious. But of course there are. For instance, one of the things I find most admirable – perhaps I just mean enviable – when I meet it in Christians is the sense of faith as a reserve of redemptive strength. The feeling that, no matter how bad things are, no matter how bad you are, Jesus loves you. The fact I don’t believe in him doesn’t invalidate the testimony of millions who have found this kind of grace when they needed it – any more than their belief invalidates the experience of those who reached for it and could not find it. I believe what they’re taking is a placebo; they believe it’s the real thing. Whoever’s right, they get a chance at the benefit, and I don’t.

Or don’t I? That kind of feeling saturates “Beautiful Day” – one of U2’s most obviously Christian singles, full of grace and floods and doves and no-room-at-the-inn. And I feel this song well enough. I think it’s the most honest and moving record Bono and the crew have landed at Number One – the one where the reliquaries of rock’n’roll and the baggage of experiment are jettisoned, and Bono sings a big, slick modern rock song about faith. Sings it well and cleverly, too – the quiet, beaten-down tone of the opening verse, that halting gap on “lend – a hand”, the breakdown into gutterals on some of the closing chorus lines; these things dramatise the idea of a man on his last chance. “Reach me – I know I’m not a hopeless case”, he pleads: there’s a need I can relate to sometimes. You don’t need to feel God is your judge to understand the urge for redemption. Irony abounds, of course – Bono’s performance here rests on him selling the idea of himself as a man of great humility. But sell it he does.

U2 are Christians, not Christian Rockers (though, like indie, that’s a genre defined by distribution and audience more than content). They are careful to make sure “Beautiful Day” is also about a lover, or a shitty week, or anything a worldwide audience wants to make it about. But I hear religion in the song’s bones. And in any case, religiosity is rarely far from the surface of stadium rock. I once wrote a piece for Pitchfork about rock music as “secular gospel” – something that harnessed the sense of yearning, awe, and the numinous in religion and translated it into a folk idiom, like soul music slyly borrowed the tactics and techniques of Church music to sing about earthly desire.

But these strategies come with a price. You don’t have to believe in God to believe in ghosts – that when you borrow from the spiritual, other inevitable associations might make the journey and haunt the music. So soul music drew on gospel to describe love and lust, and often became, at its strongest, a music about sin and the terror of judgement. Rock music harnessed the scale and awe of religion, and brought upon itself the imp of reformation – the itch to purify, refocus, be born again. In the 80s, on a song like “Bad”, U2 took a track’s length to build up a questing, burning fervor. On “Beautiful Day”, that big, stadium sized music is out of reach at the start of the song – it flares for the chorus, but dies: they have to earn it back.

Perhaps, after the exhausting – and exhausted – mess of Pop and its tour, humility came easier. U2 needed that purification themselves – though you could argue they’ve never moved significantly on since. Bono apparently objected to The Edge’s guitar tone – too retro, too close to the band’s new wave roots. But “Beautiful Day” isn’t, and isn’t trying to be, the kind of spontaneous small-band performance The Edge’s move might indicate. From its glimmering keyboards to its slightly arid drum sounds, this is as meticulously crafted and fretted over as anything on their 90s records, it’s just ended up somewhere more straightforward. It takes smaller bets than Zooropa or Pop, and they pay off: the sudden cut-ins of backing vocals on the chorus (and bits of the verses) are a good, effective example, giving a sense of the singer shored painfully up as he contemplates his life. “Beautiful Day” is a success, but U2 have become what – for better and for worse – they never used to be: a band that knows what they’re good at.

The biggest risk “Beautiful Day” takes is its sudden expansion of scale in the middle eight – “see China right in front of you”, and so on, accompanied by a ripple of William Orbit style keyboard. It shows its protagonist all the kingdoms of the earth – OK, the song isn’t all humble – not as temptation, but as a reach towards a more redemptive view, one that acknowledges the problems and error of the world but wants to love it anyway. Whether this planetary point of view is global or simply globalised – the airy take of a jet-setter with the ear of the mighty – it’s the emotional crux of the song, the turning point at which the singer shrugs off his own narrow troubles and gets that shot at redemption. If it works, the rest of “Beautiful Day” falls into place. And, for all my grudges about the man and his band, it does work. It earns the urgency of the coda – “if you don’t know you can feel it somehow”, a singer willing himself back to stardom. I am no closer, I think, to believing in God. But for a few minutes here, I can manage something quite as unlikely: I can believe in Bono.

]]>http://freakytrigger.co.uk/popular/2015/05/u2-beautiful-day/feed/148A Great Big Clipper Shiphttp://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2015/05/a-great-big-clipper-ship/
http://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2015/05/a-great-big-clipper-ship/#commentsTue, 19 May 2015 10:25:46 +0000http://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=28983 On Friday I went to the first day of Mark Sinker’s Underground/Overground conference, about the British music press from 1968-1985 – dates that spanned the rise of the underground press, its colonisation of the music papers, and the besieging or breaking of its spirit during the 80s, under competitive pressure from style and pop mags. Mark picked 1985 because of Live Aid, which was barely mentioned on the day I was there. But it was also the foundation, or first plottings at any rate, of Q Magazine, much booed and hissed as villain. And it was the year the miners’ strike ended: on the panel I moderated, Cynthia Rose mentioned how miners’ wives would turn up in the offices of the thoroughly politicised NME.

This era of the press is mythical – the time just before I began reading about music. Some of its stories and inhabitants were passed down to me. The NME ran a wary, slightly sarky assessment of its 80s at the end of them: if it had been “a market-leading socialist youth paper” – Rose’s phrase – it no longer cared to admit it. But the idea of missing something special lingered. I read and was left cold by Nick Kent’s The Dark Stuff. I read and was quietly moved by Ian Macdonald’s collected writing. I read and revered Paul Morley’s Ask.

I even once ordered up a sheaf of 1975 NMEs from the Bodleian Library. This was its printed zenith as a cultural force – in terms of numbers, at least, which all the writers disdained, except when it suited them to boast. Circulation nudging a million, and it read that way – men (nearly always) telling boys (most likely) what to do, and knowing they’d be heard. The voice of the impatient older brother if we’re being kind. Of the prefect if we’re not. Later, I read the Schoolkids Issue of Oz, the magazine that put the underground press on trial and gave Charles Shaar Murray his start. It passed through my hands in 1997, almost thirty years on, a dispatch from a world that seemed completely lost. Full of mystique, of course. But it might as well have been the Boys Own Paper, for all it mattered then and there.

Could it matter? That was the question. The panelists mostly took the answer for granted. It was the pictures that got small. Their importance – in this little history – was self-evident. They confused it, perhaps, for relevance: but that exchange rate is not often favourable.

For myself, I was disappointed these guys seemed so unable to engage with music writing today. They saw nothing to engage with. Faced with questions about the present day, they were keener to assert their legacy than to understand it. I should save my criticisms of cantankery and bitterness until I’ve successfully dodged them: the conference made your fifties seem like an obstacle course. My gaggle of friends listened respectfully, at any rate – only once, when one panelist hymned the revolutionary virtue of listening to Sufjan on the car stereo, did we break into derisive giggles. It turns out I feel closer to people fifteen years younger than me than fifteen years older – but maybe everyone does.

There was still so much to enjoy. It was a beautifully sequenced event – the press built up and knocked down. Each panel had its own texture. Take the first – Richard Williams on the left, amused and sharp, feigning apology for being the straight press’ representative among underground legends, then slipping the stiletto between the ribs of their stories. Mark Williams on the right, laconic, full of pride at battles fought, reading the pile of International Times he’d brought along. In the middle, Shaar Murray himself, shades and a cane, a great performer and a nimble thinker, a treat to see in action. No moderator needed for that.

That panel reached furthest back, to the sixties. The fucking sixties again, right? But its most tantalising parts were glimpses of an earlier sixties, before The Sixties and its stories gentrified the place. A lived sixties, before the language and stances of rock writing hardened, before the fights about its importance were won. It takes careful work, as people are older now and repeating the legend is so seductive, but the most startling parts of the event were often the music critics’ prehistory as fans. (Imagine how rich – how much more diverse, too – the stories of people who didn’t become music critics must be.)

I listened with nervous attention to stories from my own prehistory – like the hostility between the NME and Smash Hits in the early 80s. I grew up on Smash Hits: later, I read Paul Morley and felt he was doing a very similar thing. I admired both: it was curious hearing his distaste for the magazine, his performance of not grasping the point of its silly questions. Morley’s Ask, and Smash Hits’ Biscuit Tin, and Tom Hibbert’s “Who The Hell -?” series in Q, all seemed to me aspects of the same technique – destabilise the interviewee, give them no more special treatment than they might earn on wits alone. Was asking a star’s favourite colour a stupid question? Maybe. Smash Hits knew it was a chance for a smart answer.

What was the rock press’ favourite colour? We could hazard a guess. The sharpest jabs I heard were contemporary, and raised by contemporaries like Paul Gilroy and Penny Reel – What about black music? Why so few women in the underground? Why so much praise for rock? Why so middle-class? Why remember the NME and not Blues And Soul? Whatever great things the undergrounds and the inkies passed down, they passed down these issues too – unresolved, left to grow and become more obvious. This unfinished business of the early music press became the business of subsequent generations of music writers. On some counts, the inheritors did far better.

Gilroy talked about “bromantic ethnographies of the NME” – I missed his panel but that phrase jumped at me on Twitter, and I laughed. But the sense of the work on an underground or weekly mag – the circus of sheer effort involved in bringing the bastard to land each week, that was grand to hear about, like a hundred years ago you might have heard men talk about life on a whaler. Here is where common ground might be found – the grind and the process now is different, but no less arduous. Perhaps less fun, if being smashed together with other people, pushed on at speed to care noisily about things is fun. That idea of fun was what sold the music press, or at least it did to me.

But could it matter? Here is the idea I came away with. There were two strands of work discussed here, two continuities, which existed in uneasy oscillation. (The clue, of course, is in the event’s title). One is – to quote Murray quoting an old editor – “about what the music’s about”. Life, sex, politics, idiocy, drugs, fashion, whatever. The other is about the music, and the stars – who sometimes include the writers. As to the first, the underground was never a music press. But the 80s NME wasn’t always one either: that “socialist youth paper” that put Arsenal’s Charlie Nicholas on the cover one week, Chaka Khan the next. Nor was ILX, an online community that tried to be about Music but found Everything flooding in. And nor is the warp and weft of a Twitter stream or Tumblr dashboard. These were and are places where music fights for its place amidst the beguiling clutter of culture. They tend not to make writers rich.

The second continuity – which doesn’t reveal itself easily as one, because different parts of it loathe each other – puts music at the centre and works at getting close to it. The cocksure gusto of the 70s NME, the avuncular common sense of Q, the delight in sound of early 90s Melody Maker, the earnest excavations of Pitchfork (or its UK equivalents): these might detest one another on a stylistic level, but it seems to me they have more in common than any of them do with Oz. The second continuity sometimes draws energy from the first – the NME reviving itself via the undergrounds, as told at Mark’s event – and sometimes reacts against it. Individuals cross and re-cross the tracks. But they’re not the same. Music is enough, says one voice. It never is, says the other.

All Saints’ final number one is their most oblique, their most grown-up, also their finest. The song barely glances at its title – a pair of words out of a hundred in the lyric – but the whole record is a glance or a quiet smile, a celebration of tiny satisfactions, and of finding yourself with someone who conjures them so easily. “Each moment is cool / freeze the moment”. It’s a song, most of it, about feeling contented – a rare subject for pop, which prefers to nose out conflict (the video finds some anyway, staging “Black Coffee” as a post-Matrix bullet time break-up drama). There are songs – cousins to this, like “I Say A Little Prayer” – that capture the way love makes the everyday blush with significance, but “Black Coffee” is after something more comfortable. A day with your lover, as casually sweet as all the other ones. Nothing’s perfect, but “Black Coffee”’s rippling, overlapping melody lines make even the quarrels sound blissful.

It’s a lovely record, two late 90s takes on pop meshing and peaking: All Saints’ idea of a British female harmony group, and William Orbit’s gorgeous dissolve of pop into ambient bubbles and flows. (Both now disappear: All Saints split, to largely unsuccessful ends; Orbit, jilted by his primary collaborator, stepped back from the charts.) The combination, as on “Pure Shores”, is irresistibly of its time: unlike that record, “Black Coffee” isn’t pure escapism. Around the edges of this playful song snaps another, one with a harder bite. The opening and breakdown of “Black Coffee” – crunching drums, radar synths – is like a more unforgiving world which our couple spend the mid-song cocooning themselves away from.

The snap and turn of those opening beats makes me think of catwalk photography; the video feels more like a magazine shoot than a relationship. Probably more than anyone since the early 80s, All Saints were a band who felt like they belonged in fashion, a style press imagining of what pop could be like. They always looked the part, but often the music strained too hard to live up to its references. Finally, with the Orbit collaborations, they got there, and “Black Coffee” is the greatest realisation of the All Saints concept – their most perfectly glossy exterior, and only warmth inside.

It’s the spider I remember. In The Shooting Star, boy reporter Tintin is investigating an apocalyptic threat, a star on a collision course with our world. He visits an observatory, hoping they can tell him what’s going on. They can: the world is doomed. He is led to the telescope and through it he sees a colossal spider, clinging to the star.

The beast is only on the telescope lens. And the world is not doomed. But I was entranced. By that, by the panic in the streets, by the race to reach a new island formed in the wake of the star’s passing, and by the grotesque exploding mushrooms our hero finds there. Tintin is the first comic I can remember reading, and The Shooting Star is my first memory of Tintin. In many ways, I wish it was almost any of his other adventures.

Tintin had a special status in our family. My Dad and his brothers and sisters grew up in the 50s and early 60s in Switzerland as well as Britain, as their father worked for the UN. Tintin was part of their childhood, followed in his own magazine, and with each new volume a bestseller. Those albums, in their original French, followed my Gran to England when she and Grandad divorced. I learned to read French by following my Dad’s translation of L’Ile Noire and Tintin En Amerique, at his knee. He bought me Tintin in English, the Methuen paperback editions. Some of those sit on our shelves now, creased, faded, and over-loved, supplemented with newer copies.

I am not the only person who holds Tintin in special affection. There are creators who establish the visual grammar and expectations of a whole style – a whole marketplace, in some cases. Kirby, Tezuka, Herge, and so on. To encounter them young is to be taught a language. Comics writer Kieron Gillen described Watchmen (which we’ll be meeting in 1986) as a comic that teaches you how to read it. Tintin, in its discreet, precise way, is a comic that teaches you how to read comics.

It does so almost invisibly. Herge never draws attention to his storytelling decisions: like his famously economical line, they are artefacts of impeccable design. A Tintin book is never flashy, never ambiguous or confusing – it is a gorgeously smooth reading experience, a user interface Apple would envy. It is not, however, cinematic – The Shooting Star is full of two-panel sight gags and payoffs that are utterly comic-y, relying on the sharp division of frames, not the fluidity of film or animation.

Take the first three panels of the book, a slapstick gag about Snowy walking into a lamp-post. In a cartoon, it would be very hard not to introduce the lamp-post before the collision, making the joke one of anticipation. On the page, lamp-post and collision can appear simultaneously, with Snowy’s forward motion suggested by the force of impact. Our eye has been tricked upward by Tintin pointing out the star, so it feels like Snowy paying the price for our misdirection.

(Meanwhile, for new readers, the panels introduce a lot of information: Snowy can talk, he is the comic foil for the observant Tintin, it is unnaturally hot, and – for the sharp-eyed – there is a huge new star in the middle of the Great Bear. That last is the one thing you might miss, so Herge includes it as exposition next panel while leavening any dryness with another joke – verbal, this time. This guy is tight, basically.)

Two other things stand out about Herge. First, he plays very fair. The vocabulary of adventure comics is one of tight squeezes and narrow escapes. There are lots of ways to convey peril like this – having the characters talk about it, most crudely, but also using foreshortening or dramatic cutting to heighten the imminence and narrowness of the danger while also drawing out its resolution. Herge’s approach is a more honest one: he establishes the physicality of a location precisely and doesn’t amplify it to make peril seem greater, relying on that clarity to make the danger more vivid. For instance, there’s a great scene in The Shooting Star where Snowy is on the deck of a pitching and tilting ship, in danger of being swept away. In quick cuts across half a dozen panels, Herge establishes Snowy’s presence on the deck, then a hole in the deck wall through which water is hurtling, then a surge of water which moves Snowy nearer the wall, then – oh no! – he’s half out of the hole before being grabbed by Tintin. It’s so basic that pointing it out seems insulting. But I will remember reading it for the rest of my life – the solidity of the wall and hole, the force of the spray exploding through it.

Herge is a creator you trust, then. And the second reason you trust is his attention to detail. A famously scrupulous researcher, his settings and vehicles are created with the precision of an Airfix modeller and then rendered with the satisfying plastic simplicity of a Lego builder. So, reading The Shooting Star, I knew that were I to ever see a seaplane, it would look like a Herge seaplane. (Tintin is full of seaplanes.) I knew that if I ever saw a Norwegian dock in the 1940s, it would look like the dock Captain Haddock stops in to refuel. If I ever clung to a lamp-post to watch rats surge through the streets… well, the lamp-post would be Hergeian too. He was scrupulous about this: apparently he fretted for years afterwards that Tintin’s ship would not in fact be seaworthy. But if I was ever on a ship looking for a crashed meteorite, I would expect it to look like Tintin’s ship, the Aurora.

And if I summon to mind a corrupt financier, surely he would look like the corrupt financier, Bohlwinkel.

Which is something of a problem. Because Bohlwinkel looks like – well, he is well-fed, balding, dark haired, with a long curved nose, fleshy, smirking lips, and beady, leering eyes. He looks like a caricature Jew, in a comic written and published in Nazi-occupied Belgium, in 1941. The very economy and exactitude, the trustworthiness, of Herge’s cartooning is suborned by a racist stereotype.

It gets worse. Herge uses his command of the techniques of comics to continually remind us that Bohlwinkel is an alien presence, a foreign body within his story of scientific adventure. The rest of The Shooting Star is – as ever with Tintin – a world of detail: streets, docks, and crashed meteorites rendered with beautiful parsimony, always just enough to be real, never a line more. But Bohlwinkel’s panels are empty of background: he sits, leaning eagerly in to hear the radio, in a yellow space whose sharp, sickly vibrancy contrasts with the less jarring palette Herge uses for his outdoor action. He is an interruption in the story, never physically active, listening and manipulating. The heroic characters never meet him. His plots wither on contact with the real world, foiled by the camaraderie of sailors, the derring-do of Tintin, and the decency of the unnamed man on the rival ship who prevents Tintin being shot.

Bohlwinkel is the symbolic spider at the story’s centre, mirroring the physically monstrous spiders on the telescope and later on the meteorite-island. Of course the association, then and now, of Jews with spiders is an anti-Semitic commonplace. But you needn’t buy that parallel to grasp the role Bohlwinkel is playing. He incarnates the ancient prejudice of the Jew as schemer, string-puller, the secret conspiracy behind misfortune. He is considerably more than just a caricature, let alone an accidental one as Herge later hinted – everything about his role in the story and the symbolism it’s associated with is nakedly and purposefully anti-Semitic.

Herge pointed out that there are plenty of comic stereotypes all through Tintin – spoiled Arab brats, drunken Englishmen, nutty professors, and so on. He was, you might say, an “equal opportunities” satirist. He had even spoofed the Nazis themselves, in an earlier book, and deserves credit for that. But only one of his satirical targets was the simultaneous victim of organised state oppression, then genocide. Did the good, worried folk of Charleroi and Liege, presenting their papers and going about their daily lives under the Nazis, understand what was happening to the Jewish-owned businesses in their towns? What speculation reached them? They could, at least, open up Le Soir and escape with Tintin into a world that reassured them that whatever prejudices Europe’s Jewry faced, they had to a degree brought it on themselves. The Mysterious Star ended its run in May 1942, with an expression of comic horror on Bohlwinkel’s flabby face as his schemes are found out and he learns the authorities are on his trail. That same month, the Jews of Belgium were given a star of their own to wear.

Why has the anti-Semitism in The Shooting Star not destroyed its reputation? Tintin In The Congo, the boy reporter’s notoriously racist first adventure, now comes in shrinkwrap, with a stern warning to librarians. The Shooting Star is simply part of the canon. Part of it, I think, is that Herge shields Tintin himself from Herge’s own casual anti-Semitism. Congo is repulsive not just because of Herge’s gross caricatures of black people, but because Tintin is so explicitly the voice and hand of colonial power. Without racism, and the racial horror of Belgium’s Empire, there is no story in Tintin In The Congo. (There’s not much of one in any case.) In The Shooting Star, though, the main plot is of a race between international science and private enterprise for control of knowledge – with Tintin, sympathetically, on the side of science. The story requires a cheating capitalist. It does not require that capitalist to be a Jew.

Bohlwinkel is, of course, never named as such: when Herge put together the colour volume of The Shooting Star – the one we have now – he cut another anti-Semitic scene and changed his financiers name to Bohlwinkel from the more telling Blumenstein. He felt this defused the issue. But he did not redraw the man – and Bohlwinkel’s Jewishness exists as code, instantly obvious to most readers in Occupied Europe in 1941, blessedly oblivious but potentially insidious to a 5-year old boy in 1978.

Within Tintin fandom you can find all the strands of opinion you might expect – the loyalists who take Herge’s line that the book’s anti-Semitism is accidental; the majority who consider it a regrettable lapse in an otherwise fine book, or simply feel it doesn’t matter and wasn’t it all a long time ago. And a few who think the book is a blot on Herge’s career. (Those who feel it damns the entire Tintin enterprise are presumably not in the fandom in the first place.) How do I feel?

I read the book when I was five. Re-reading it now, its setpieces are as striking and resonant as ever. The comic is an outlier in the Tintin canon, one of the few books where the uncanny – always lurking in Herge’s work at the edges of adventure, in dreams or as implications or as a mystery to be solved – bursts through the skin of the story. The book starts and ends with wonder – a world burning, then flooded; and an island of transformed science which exists only for a few hours. Herge, for all the buttoned-down repression his cool lines suggest, could be the most psychological of cartoonists. His affinity for the quiet comforts of the bourgeois world, struggling with his storyteller’s instinct to breach them, made him unusually good at capturing disquiet and upset. No wonder his wartime books are so strange and strong.

Perhaps my lifelong attraction to the mood of a comic begins here, in the panels set in the glow of the meteor’s approach, where the solidity of Herge’s universe begins to literally melt: faithful Snowy becomes stuck on a road of liquefying tarmac; the light and line becomes starker and sharper, and the characters’ shadows themselves become sticky and treacherous. Comics have so many ways of capturing feeling like this, of conveying interiority through how they show the world’s exterior. The crisis passes, of course: Tintin learns the world is safe in the most comically bourgeois way possible, via the Belgian speaking clock. In the midst of upheaval, order prevails.

But that’s the danger of it. A common twentieth-century British fantasy – perhaps it still is one – was to imagine what we might have done ourselves under Nazi occupation. Nobody chose collaborator. Mostly we imagined ourselves in a heroic role, more or less – if not as an actual resistance fighter, then at least hiding Jews, sneaking messages to the Free British, weighing out butter and boiled sweets to the occupying troops with a very English frost. This last agrees with the grim statistical likelihood of occupation: resenters would have been far more common than dissenters. But what good do resenters do, really?

Herge was not a collaborator. But The Shooting Star is a collaboration: an acceptance – inevitable, its defenders would say – of the realities of occupation, a newly disturbed world. Certain prejudices become more acceptable. Certain ones become less so. Certain dreams endure – both sides loved their scientists, after all. The Shooting Star takes all of this on board – how pragmatic it is – makes a quiet bet on the status quo, and reflects it in its choice of villain.

That is its lesson. It’s a beautiful, exciting, seductive comic, which is also a reminder – because, thank goodness, it lost that bet – of how casual and thoughtless acquiescence is. Because it’s so beautiful and exciting, it isn’t an easy reminder. It’s not a Tintin In The Congo, an evil comic which is also a bad one, hence simple to deplore. The Shooting Star is a splendid comic, its evil a subtle ripple, an answer to a single question, who is my villain, that’s as much lazy as bad. The Nazis are gone. The question – who is my villain? – has not. I gave The Shooting Star to my five year old son to read – he adored it. Why wouldn’t you? Because he adored it, I write this, for him to read later.

I don’t know if “Against All Odds” is the best Phil Collins song. I suspect it is. But it’s certainly the most Phil Collins song, the complete conjunction of things you might associate with Phil Collins: song-shifting drum breakdowns, male pattern agony, everybloke blues. It’s also a song that attracts covers: writing about one of them on NYLPM, I said: “The ur-version of “Against All Odds” will always be by a drunk divorced man in a suburban karaoke, singing his desperate heart away – Phil’s original is just a guide vocal.”

The song gets its power from its poker-game tension between lyric and arrangement. As the words get more hopeless, the music raises its stake in the other direction, increasing the defiance and bombast. The worse this guy’s prospects look, the more the music is telling us he might still have a chance. Fights against all odds are what heroes do, right? So you could imagine “Against All Odds” done without the drum breakdown, and without its singer going all-in at the end – in fact it might be interesting – but that isn’t the route Collins takes, and Mariah Carey follows him closely. Her cover is of a piece with her “Without You”: a power ballad classic faithfully rendered, with a shot of vocal rocket-fuel.

It’s striking, in fact, how little Mariah re-interprets the song: most of the major decisions that sound like they might be hers – the ever-extending melisma on each “now”, her pushing her voice to the point of cracking on the very final chorus, that last drawn-out “take”, and the rather deflationary, resigned ending – are there when Phil Collins sings it. He’s not the powerhouse she is, and he ends up sounding angry where she sounds steely – but hers is a strong, if conservative, version of a fine song.

If only I was writing about it. I sort of am, of course – this collaboration is actually more of a remix, with Mariah Carey’s vocal line edited down and Westlife drafted to fill in the gaps that leaves. They were the bigger UK stars, kicking off the promotion for their second album, and they get to start the record off – but the sleeve doesn’t lie. They are the guest act here. And what a wretched job of it they do.

It’s hard to see how arranging “Against All Odds” as a duet would help it in any circumstances – a song about abjecting yourself for an absent lover doesn’t really need anyone joining in. Let alone these five feckless sods: it’s a big song, but not that big. On the early verses it doesn’t matter too much – the singing is on the oafish side, but they’re not trying to have Mariah’s or Westlife’s bits communicate, so I can’t really fault that they don’t. And the song keeps Mariah’s best moment intact – her sad, soft reading of the first chorus. But when Westlife are drafted in as backing vocals on the final choruses, toes are very much being trodden on. Westlife footle around the edges of Carey’s delivery (”Taaaake…a…loook….”), unwisely try and take her on (”STANDING HERE!”), and settle in the end for just leeching any remaining drama from her vocals (”Chance I gotta take…gotta take”). Making the ending even smarmier – and throwing on one of those ubiquitous glimmering keyboard effects – is just a bonus.

Mariah – or her record company – are just as culpable here: she wanted a hit, this was the path to one. For Westlife, it telegraphed two things: they were big enough to share billing, if not studio time, with a global megastar. And their second album would, if anything, be more conservative than their first. Nobody involved with “Against All Odds” was taking any chances. Except with quality.

“Lady (Hear Me Tonight)” came hard on the heels of “Groovejet” as a revivalist disco hit. It also works as a despondent, pleading answer record: where Sophie Ellis-Bextor embraces the dancefloor as a flirtatious zone of mystery and ambiguity, “Lady” begs for resolution. Lyrically, musically, emotionally, it circles its sampled groove like water circling a drain. Where “Groovejet” is spry, happy to lose itself in the possibility of disco, “Lady” finds a rut and keeps scratching it deeper in its despairing neediness. The singles’ proximity does “Lady” no favours – this suitor, and his simple plea, is run rings round.

What’s interesting for me about the comparison is that “Lady” is outclassed even though it’s classier. Where Spiller’s production was a lucky dip of disco sonics, Modjo cut their cloth from the most impeccable of sources: Chic, specifically late-period soundtrack single “Soup For One”. Soup For One – the film – sounds missable, a Woody Allen-esque rom-com about a single dude’s struggles in 80s NYC. “Soup For One”, the single, condenses anything you might need to know about the topic into five faintly paranoid minutes: it’s worth the salvage. Modjo brighten Nile Rodgers’ riff and refine it further, extracting a tincture of frustration. They pay the sample a sizeable compliment: hearing “Lady”, you imagine it’s from earlier in Chic’s career than it is.

By 2000, that career was a dance music touchstone. In Disco’s heyday, Chic’s British chart presence was consistent, but there was no specific breakthrough. Each incarnation – the irresistibly lean party funk of “Le Freak”, the barbed and brittle social observation of “Good Times”, or the terrible frozen longing of their slow jams – bobbed around in the top ten. Part of the fabric, but not dominant. Instead, this is their moment – the pristine, precise Rodgers/Edwards sound, “glass mountains on fire” as Melody Maker’s Paul Lester once called it, became a shorthand for disco itself. And their sense of economy – disco as a vehicle for intense emotion coolly expressed – was the backbone of the music’s French and international revival.

Which is something Modjo get right. “Lady (Hear Me Tonight)” has few ideas, it’s an emotional monochrome, and it comes off worse in an unfair comparison. But it lands a genuine feeling – the awkward anomie of the dancefloor – making it a track I won’t play often but appreciate when I do. Yann Destal’s vocal is an animal chewing its own tail, but there’s some sense of relief in the track’s secret weapon: its springy, Bernard Edwards-esque bassline, which drags “Lady” out of its own soup for one and at least offers the possibility of liberation.

]]>http://freakytrigger.co.uk/popular/2015/05/modjo-lady-hear-me-tonight/feed/44Rockwrite UK: its roots and discontents, its early evolution and its latent potentialhttp://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2015/05/rockwrite-uk-its-roots-and-discontents-its-early-evolution-and-its-latent-potential/
http://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2015/05/rockwrite-uk-its-roots-and-discontents-its-early-evolution-and-its-latent-potential/#commentsFri, 01 May 2015 12:09:22 +0000http://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=28930FT readers who are interested in writing about music and the specifics of its history in the UK, I have organised a treat for you (if you live in or near London, or happen to be visiting in precisely two weeks time = May 15-16 2015). It is THIS: a conference called UNDERGROUND/OVERGROUND: The Changing Politics of UK Music-Writing: 1968-85, and it is happening here: Birkbeck University of London, London WC1E 7HX (see below for details). I’m delighted (and in fact flattered) that a line-up of very interesting names and speakers (also see below) have agreed to sit on panels discussing a variety of things, from who exactly the constituency for the rock papers was in the 70s and early 80s, to how the hell did the countercultural voice get to cross from the underground press of the late 60s into what were at least ostensibly the trade papers of the leisure industry (viz Melody Maker, NME, Sounds, Record Mirror et al); to (finally) what can all this mean for us today, three decades on?

I am extremely excited! And nervous! And worried no one will turn up — or too many people will turn up, or there will be a fight, or everyone will agree with everyone else and it will be boring, or [insert OTHER things that could go wrong] [but don’t tell me what they are!]

More soberly (and quoting myself elsewhere), It will be a two-day symposium at London’s Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, consisting of panel discussions and Q&As, bringing together writers, editors and readers of the underground and trade music presses of the 1970s and 80s with academics and other media commentators, to discuss the emergence and evolution of the countercultural voice in the UK, as inflected through the rock papers between these dates. The proceedings are being recorded and transcribed, to form the core of a subsequent published collection, alongside additional memoirs and essays from participants (especially those unable to attend).

The two days of the conference will focus on the period when UK rockwriting emerged out of the conflict between a rising generation’s counterculture and the embattled establishment in the late 60s and early 70s, and how well (or badly) it reflected the turbulent times, and on the period when this distinctive milieu began significantly to be reintegrated back into the mainstream, the 1980s, and the form this reintegration took; it will also discuss the wider legacy, good and ill, from the 80s to the present day.

Things you need to know:1: it is free! 2: you register here! 3: this does currently say the event is “sold out” but this is always misleading for free events like this, especially at weekends — leave your name on the waitlist and turn up anyway, you will very likely get in! (I hope!) 4: related tumblr here, FB page here

5: dates and times = Friday-Saturday 15-16 May 20156: address =

Room B33
Main Building
Malet Street (but entrance is maybe easier from Torrington Square?)Birkbeck University of London
London
WC1E 7HX

3.30–5.00: panel discussion The encroachment of professionalisation on a generational playpen — What were the pressures in a music paper’s editorial office, and what was the potential?Beverley Glick (aka Betty Page), Cynthia Rose, Tony Stewart
Chair: Tom Ewing

Saturday 16 May 2015

9.45–11.00: conversationVal Wilmer, David Toop, Richard WilliamsHow to cover lesser known musicians and musics in the mainstream music press, and topics arising
(David unfortunately had to cancel as he was unwell; Richard stepped in at the last moment, for which I’m extremely grateful.)

ADDING: Special thanks to
i: Birkbeck Institute of the Humanities who helped fund and host it (especially Julia Eisner and Esther Leslie).
ii: Music & Letters journal, who awarded us £500 towards recording and transcription.
iii: Rock’s Back Pages, who gave me countless useful steers and contacts in the planning stages.
v: Cis and Tom and Hazel and Pete for help above and beyond…
vi: Joe “Pinefox” Brooker, from whose suggestions the original concept derived.
vii: and of course to everyone who agreed to be on a panel!

This is an origin story. Thirty years ago, give or take a day, I went to my local newsagent and I bought a new comic. The next day I asked the newsagent, Mr.Mann, he of the back room full of protein supplements and ‘marital advice’ partworks, to reserve it for me every fortnight. Two months later he was putting aside a second comic, 2000AD. Six months later I found a source for imported US Marvel comics, and I started ordering those. And so it grows.

The origin story is no different from any other comics fan’s. It begins when something radioactive bites you. Bought in a corner shop (but it could have been glimpsed in an attic, snipped up on Tumblr, passed on by an older sister, found in a doctor’s waiting room) – it sinks its teeth in. You’re changed. You borrow, and read, and buy. With great power comes financial irresponsibility. You walk away sometimes, you come back other times. And thirty years later, here you are.

There’s nothing special about the comic that does this to you. It could have been any comic. Like every origin story, mine comes with precedents, and acquires retcons. I can go back to 1978, age 5, and fill in the gaps of my comics prehistory. I will. But even if it wasn’t my first, that one comic is a turning point.

What was it? Marvel Super Heroes Secret Wars #1. Not the American one. The British one. It had free transfers, and free foam stickers, which tore the covers up and lived on my bedroom door for months until they finally peeled away. It had a bonus feature – the Secret Artist, drawing distorted mockeries of Marvel characters, Basil Wolverton style. (The Secret Artist looks a bit like Cliff Robinson, who drew a few Dredds later in the 80s for 2000AD)

It also had the main story, a full reprint – flicking between colour and black and white – of the American Secret Wars first issue. That was what did it.

Secret Wars feels enormously contrived now. It felt enormously contrived then. Sean Howe, in his book on Marvel, uncovers market research by toy company Mattel which revealed that the most attractive words to small boys were “Secret” and “War”. Rather than go with a Contras playset, it teamed up with Marvel whose editor in chief, Jim Shooter, cooked up and wrote the series.

Shooter establishes the tone of Secret Wars immediately. The comic opens with two space stations floating in the void. On one are twenty or so heroes. On the other are a dozen villains. Each station gets a long panel where all the heroes, and all the villains, stand in line, and say one line of dialogue each. That dialogue is as stilted as the staging, making sure a newbie kid could understand who everyone was. I get the impression anyone who had been reading comics for longer than a year rolled their eyes hard at it. I was that newbie kid, though. I loved it.

Secret Wars gave you heroes by the yard. For a long time my mental hierarchy of Marvel Comics was defined by who had been in Secret Wars. The Vision, mopey android and Avengers perennial, wasn’t in Secret Wars: so he was second tier. The Wrecking Crew, interminable Thor cannon fodder, were in Secret Wars: so they were major players. Recently I read a Thor issue where Titania (white trash, spiked shoulder pads, introduced in Secret Wars) rocked up. Somewhere in me, my kid self was delighted: I was there when WIMPY SKEETER DAVIS was transformed into TITANIA. And she’s still with the Absorbing Man! Aw. When you’re present for a character’s first appearance, they become yours – a trick of nostalgia that has served American companies very well over their long, recycled history.

The idea of Secret Wars is that the heroes fight the villains. Obviously. This is Marvel, though, and what I didn’t understand was the narrative pressure, which Marvel has often tried to corral and civilise but never quite controlled, to make things not just more complicated but stranger: to let the flaws and angst and breast-beating characterisation of 60s Marvel in, and the freewheeling stoner oddness of 70s Marvel. Secret Wars should have been the corporate fight comic par excellence. And yet… there was issue two, and already Magneto was wooing The Wasp in a building that looked like a tuning fork crossed with an airport viewing platform, set amidst a plain of colossal, writhing pink worms. Shooter, I learned later, had made bloody sacrifice of Weird Marvel at the start of his editorial reign, but he couldn’t shake its ghost.

By the end of the comic, Doctor Doom – its secret lead – was weighing up the problems of omnipotence (a favourite Shooter theme) after galvanising a plot that swung wildly between invention and inanity. My Dad was very taken by Doom. So was I. His drive to dominate any story he’s in rescues the comic. The superhero event – here almost at its birth – is already being recreated in the image of Doom and his soliloquys. He’s won, the heroes are dead. (Shooter, inheritor of Marvel’s hallowed properties, wanted to destroy and replace them, making grand plans for a New Universe that would supplant the sixties icons). But as long as one scrap remains, might not Doom himself bring them back to life, by some freakish impulse? (And here he was, writing the story designed to make them more iconic – by which we mean, saleable – than ever before.)

Art and money and megalomania and trash – Secret Wars has the ingredients that made the American comics biz so terrible, so great, and so addictive. Thirty years on, Marvel are about to release a sequel, and my brother (who read my issues, and had his own favourites: he dug Hulk best, I liked Thor) is writing tie-ins. I’m delighted. But that is, genuinely, a coincidence. This series of pieces is not about that comic, or Marvel. It is about a life loving comics, and occasionally despising comics.

The rules. One comic for each year I’ve been reading them, except 1985, which gets another bite as well as this. Not always written or published that year – just my own firmest memory of being a reader. Where I was, who I was, but mostly what the comic did, the sensation of reading it. On one of the drifting space stations, lined up ready to fight, are thirty years of memories and fond recollections. On the other are my adult perspectives, doubts, issues. For now, they’re the villains, alright. But this is comics. Nobody stays a villain for ever.

A single that’s good for one thing, at least: “Which group got to No.1 with Take On Me?” is a reliably sneaky pop quiz question. Beyond that, it’s tempting to dismiss A1’s version as irrelevant. Doubly tempting if you were 12 in 1985, and the clean surge of that keyboard riff still sounded like the bright world of life and youth and adventure opening up in front of you. It’s not that a cover version is any kind of sacrilege – just that you can’t update the eternally young. But listen again and A-Ha’s original sounds stuck in its time: the synthesisers thin, the drum sound hollow and deadened. That doesn’t make it less glorious to me, it just reminds me of the work memory does in making songs great. Why not give new 12-year olds a chance for memories of their own?

That’s the logic of the pop micro-genre “Take On Me” reminds me of: not cover versions so much as reboots. Sweden specialised in them: the A-Teens, four perky kids who mixed ABBA numbers with bouncy originals. Or West End Girls, two girls tasked with bringing a teenpop gloss to the Pet Shop Boys. If “Take On Me” wasn’t by A1, you could imagine it as the launch single for A-Half, three jaunty, bright-eyed miniatures of Morton, Mags and Pal. The approach is identical: dusty 80s synths and beats swapped out for slightly clubbier, zippier 90s ones, and a match of proven songs with eye candy for tweens. It was good business, cheerful, and certainly cheap. And – for all you might sniff at it – actually quite hard to really fuck up from a musical perspective.

So yes, A1’s “Take On Me” can’t be the Proustian H-bomb of associations the original is for me – the pop memory is acutely attuned to texture and nuance, the detail of a track, which is why cheap re-recordings, Top Of The Pops Orchestra versions, and covers by “The Original Artists” can be so close and so wrong. But even so it’s still the same song, the same alchemising of a brief fling into a fairytale epic. It has much of the melodic joy, some of the enthusiasm, even a bit of the charm. But it falls down badly on the singing – A1 are anaemic gerbils against Morten Harket’s theatrical falsetto. (And in place of the romance of A-Ha’s landmark video, A1 give us an excruciating cyberpunk riff, which makes no difference to the record but you should see anyway, just because it’s funny.)

Still, their “Take On Me” is a creditable try. No shame on anyone involved. What it doesn’t do is make the case for A1 as anything other than a lower-tier boyband. There was room for a tween-appeal group alongside Westlife’s broader church, and A1 had already notched several hits, but Autumn 2000 was the peak for them. They came with two different marketing angles that didn’t really work together – they had the wholesome cheek of early Take That, and they wrote their own songs. But writing your own songs only matters if you’re good at it, and “Take On Me” was the first memorable record the band put out, even if the memories were all borrowed.